


Les Mignardises

by idiopathology



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Coming Untouched, JUST PAINT THE WALLS WITH EJACULATE, M/M, Nipple Play, Overstimulation, Sex in Chapter 9 My Dear Pervert Friends, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:14:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 58,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24363382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idiopathology/pseuds/idiopathology
Summary: Slowly, like the trickling warmth of the tide coming in, the flush rises in Gavin's cheeks. He doesn't answer, just stomps away as belligerently as he can with two dozen eggs nestled in his apron, while Tina and Chris exchange their animated chatter. Spellbound still, Nines follows Gavin with his eyes until he stomps into the staff entrance and disappears from sight.Two different things, what Nines is meant to do and what he has come here for.I came here for you,he thinks.---Restaurant AU. Gavin Reed is the head chef of a sinking restaurant, RK900 is the floor manager hired to handle him, and everyone else is just caught in the crossfire. Or, THE MICHELIN STAR IS A MCGUFFIN AND THE TRUE REVIEWS ARE THE CO-WORKERS WE OGLED ALONG THE WAY
Relationships: Captain Allen/Gavin Reed, Upgraded Connor | RK900/Gavin Reed
Comments: 329
Kudos: 509





	1. Hors d'oeuvres

## I.

It was early in the season still, but the Wellfleets were gorgeous. _Mouth of Blackfish Creek,_ Chris had said as he dropped them off. _They won't disappoint_. Tina set her knife down on the side towel and paused to take in the deep nestle of the oyster cup in the scoop of her palm, the ridges of its scrubbed-clean shell against her skin. She closed her eyes and put her lips to its edge, tilting her head back, letting the coin of meat glide like silk into her mouth.

"Your job looks a lot easier than mine," she heard Gavin say. "Can we trade?"

Tina let him know just how unimpressed she was with him, staring him down as she chewed, as slowly as she could. Wellfleet, mouth of Blackfish Creek, brimming with the liquor of clean sea brine-- a firm and milky richness to the flesh, crisp with the rushing tide of its northern waters. She savored it. As the taste on her tongue sweetened to hints of honeyed fruit, Gavin finally backed down and looked away first.

"Come on," said Tina, after she had swallowed, unhurriedly. "They're incredible."

"Of course," said Gavin. "Wouldn't expect any less from Chris."

He was hunched over a shucked oyster, fiddling with a microplane. Tina craned her neck over the island and found that he was shaving away at a stump of bottarga.

"With lemon zest?" he asked without looking up.

"Stop it," she said. "First the pickled green strawberries, then the melon cucumber gelee. Now this."

"Or maybe lemon butter," he said. "I'm not sure. I could try both."

"Try neither," she suggested. "Leave the oysters alone."

"I can't," he said.

There was something about his answer that lodged in her throat the wrong way, tight and swollen. She tried to slap the microplane out of his hand; he pulled away and her swing went wide.

"For god's sake, Gavin," she said. "They're great the way they are. Serve them with a-- a mignonette or something, stop fighting your own ingredients."

He lay the microplane down with a clatter of stainless steel, crossed his arms and didn't take his eyes off the seafood tray. The Wellfleet was a dollop of cream underneath its soft mound of garnish.

"None of it's working," he said. "Not the strawberries, not the gelee. Not this either."

"So don't mess with them," she said, quietly. "You don't always have to do so much, you know. You don't have to do anything."

Gavin's hand tightened in the sleeve of his chef coat, leaving a smear of saltwater across the fabric. His fingers were ruddy with work, flecked with shrapnels of shell and grime, and Tina could feel all of him knot up like a fist.

"Then what am I good for?" he asked.


	2. Potage

## II.

Nines studies the plaque. It hangs on the door at eye level, discreetly sized at no bigger than his forearm, colored the same unassuming charcoal grey as the spotless awning above his head. _Les Mignardises_ , it reads, champagne-pale hairline serifs dissolving into quiescence. _All in all, a tasteful facade,_ concludes Nines. Particularly for a failing restaurant on its last desperate legs.

He rounds the corner into an alleyway leading to the staff entrance, and immediately retracts his verdict. There's a foot hanging out of the dumpster. Somewhat reluctantly, Nines begins to make his way over to peer under the lid -- _is dealing with the aftermath of a homicide under my professional purview?_ \-- when the foot stirs of its own accord.

"Go away," the dumpster mumbles at him, indistinctly through the ricochet of echoes inside the bin.

"I have no intention of disturbing you," Nines informs the dumpster.

"So fuck right off then," suggests the dumpster.

While no pushover, Nines is also not in the habit of getting into arguments with what he assumes must be a territorial opossum gifted with the power of human speech. Besides, _Meet Fowler in the back office of Les Mignardises_ keeps flashing insistently at the corner of his eye; every second he loiters outside is a second his tasks are left undone. It's a sensation literally built into him, this satisfaction of doing what he's meant to do, but he doubts even deviancy would rid him of it completely. Connor said as much, when he asked. _Some things don't go away._ And after a cautious beat: _Maybe, someday, you'll see for yourself._

Nines knocks at the door to the back office.

"Fowler," he says, then -- uneasy somehow with the curtness of it -- "sir," he adds.

"Come in," Fowler calls from inside.

The office is a postage stamp of a room, most of its floor space taken up by a desk at the far end and a haggard couch running alongside the wall. Fowler looks up from his sheaf of paperwork, lit more in profile by the banker's lamp next to him than the dim glow of the ceiling sconce. He exudes an air of chronic exasperation that has only intensified since they spoke last.

"Stop it with the _sir_ ," says Fowler. "We're brigade, but not so brigade as all that."

"Got it," says Nines.

"Case in point," says Fowler, "the chef de cuisine is late and unwilling to answer his phone, presumably because he could not give less of a shit about his continued employment. This restaurant is my personal hell. I don't understand why I still own it."

"It's... a bit rough around the edges," says Nines. "Someone inside a dumpster in the alley out back told me to fuck right off."

Fowler's face immediately clouds over into a murky grimace. He leaps to his feet and charges out the door, rolling up his sleeves.

"Wait here," he says over his shoulder. "I'm going to kill that son of a bitch."

Nines should have figured. He knew enough about Gavin Reed to make an educated guess. As he stands by the desk and glances over its jumble of bills and receipts and permit applications, the commotion from outside drifts in through the corridors in muffled bursts. Nines catches a phrase here and there: _Fired you a long time ago_ , from Fowler, then -- from what must be Gavin -- _see you try and put me out of my misery_. There's the scream of a sink tap yanked to full force in the bathroom, an indignant splutter of _Jesus fucking Christ,_ a long and jagged coughing fit, and a very pointed bout of silence before Fowler stomps back into the office with his shirtsleeves wet. Gavin follows behind, sullenly scrubbing at his dripping hair with a hand towel.

"Thanks for joining us, Reed," says Fowler.

"Sure," says Gavin. "No problem."

He falls onto the couch -- falls _into_ , rather, the cushions sagging dramatically under the impact of his descent -- and refuses to look at either of them. He's death warmed over in a crumpled t-shirt, the heel of one hand pressed against his temple, a trace of last night's drink still lingering around him. _This is Gavin Reed_ , thinks Nines, filing the moment away. Certainly much worse for wear at the moment, but he looks every bit as palpably unwilling to be there as he did in any of his magazine spreads. Recognizable in that, at least.

"Why were you sleeping inside a garbage bin?" asks Fowler from his chair.

"It was raining," says Gavin, "and I couldn't remember how to get home."

"But you could remember how to get to work?" asks Fowler.

"Guess I'm employee of the month," says Gavin. "It was a recycling bin, by the way. I have standards."

"You were supposed to be here an hour ago," says Fowler.

"That's a joke," says Gavin. "I don't have standards."

"The reason I asked you to be here an hour ago," says Fowler, "was so that I could give you the news in private. But since you decided to vacation in a dumpster instead of gracing us with your presence on time, I suppose we'll all just have to suffer what's about to happen. Reed, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce you to RK900, the floor manager I've hired to oversee front of house details. RK900, as you can see-- this is Gavin Reed, the chef de cuisine."

Before Nines can get out so much as a greeting, Gavin has whirled on Fowler.

"You hired a fucking _babysitter?_ " yells Gavin. "Fowler, are you shitting me? You're putting a _nanny_ on my back? Because what, you didn't like the way I _listened_ to you when you made me fire my own people? Was it a problem that I did _exactly what you told me to do?_ "

"See, this is why I had to hire him!" Fowler yells back. "You're so fucking shit at personnel management, and you resent me so much for it that you don't ever fucking get anything else done! Where's my menu, Reed? You're on top of everything, why don't you tell me that?"

"How's some asshole breathing down my neck all the time going to help?" exclaims Gavin. "It's just going to fuck up my system!"

"You don't _have_ a system!" yells Fowler, gesticulating wildly. "Keeping every petty thief and junkie on the payroll just because you don't want to deal with the fallout _is not a system!_ "

"So your solution is to just kick them out onto the street?" demands Gavin.

"We both know I'm doing you a huge favor," says Fowler, "so can we please just get past this whole exhausting song and dance where you're too proud to admit how relieved you are? Jesus, I told you to come early so that you could have an hour to throw your tantrum! We don't have time for this--"

"--If I could," interjects Nines, quietly.

Fowler and Gavin both flinch, startled to remember that Nines is in the room. Fowler throws up his hands and leans back into his chair, ceding the floor, a tacit _he's your problem now_. When Nines turns to Gavin, he finds Gavin still staring at him.

"...Connor?" says Gavin, half to himself. "No, that's not right. You're not--"

"I'm Connor's successor model," says Nines. "RK900 to Connor's RK800. It's good to meet you, Chef."

"How'd you find this guy?" Gavin asks Fowler, jerking a thumb towards Nines. "You keep a running list of faces that piss me off? Very fucking funny."

"It was on recommendation," says Fowler, mouth contorting like he's tasted something very bitter. There's an uncharacteristic hesitation in his voice when he continues. "Since RK900 knows Connor, and since Connor knows-- well, since Connor is--"

"--You asked Anderson," says Gavin in a sharp intake of breath. "You _actually went to_ \--"

"Gavin," says Fowler, a low warning.

The whole room tenses, expecting Gavin to fly off his handle again. Nines doesn't have all the pieces yet to put the story together, but based on what he's seen in the past few minutes, he can surmise that Gavin losing his temper is the most probable result in almost any circumstance. Even Gavin appears to expect it of himself, twisting his hands in the damp towel until his knuckles seem ready to pierce through skin.

But in the end, there's none of that. Gavin just slumps back into the cushions, palms up, the fight drained out of him. Fowler lets out a huff of air.

"Okay," says Gavin, at last. "All this shouting was giving me a headache, anyway."

"Your trash can hangover is what's giving you a headache," says Fowler.

"Recycling," mutters Gavin.

"If I could," says Nines, again. They take the hint. "Chef, I am well aware of the parameters of my position, and I assure you that your authority in the kitchen will remain intact. As I understand it, what happens over the next few months will prove critical for the future of Les Mignardises; I am here to lend my services in order that the restaurant -- that _you_ \-- be able to perform at full capacity." On second thought, he adds, "I have no intention of disturbing you."

Gavin looks him in the eye and flips up a middle finger.

"As I'm sure you've heard, Michelin is coming to town," says Fowler. "That's our Hail Mary. At the kind of loss we're running here, we can't stay open for much longer than half a year, tops. I should have listened when everyone told me that a restaurant would be terrible investment-- everyone said so. Why didn't I listen?"

"So we're gunning for a star?" asks Gavin, suspiciously.

"That's the plan," says Fowler. "Of course, as it stands, our menu is a big crock of bull. I've been telling you that since opening. You and your crew can cook, sure, that part's taken care of. But this menu won't get us anywhere. If I found a spare star in my goddamn pants pocket on laundry day, I still wouldn't give it to us."

"Menu seems perfectly decent to me," says Gavin.

"Oh, it's perfectly decent," says Fowler, "but perfectly decent won't net us that star. The problem is that the menu isn't _you_. It's _someone's_ menu, maybe, but it's sure as hell not yours."

"That's great." Gavin barks out a laugh. " _Now_ you want me to do me."

"Reed, you piece of shit," says Fowler. "I've been telling you to do you since day fucking one. It's you that's been completely incapable of figuring out what that is."

Gavin clears his throat, but says nothing.

"RK900 has front of house, so you've got no more excuses to fall back on," says Fowler. "I want that menu, Reed. You get the menu done, and the star will follow. Understand?"

Worrying at his bottom lip, Gavin narrows his eyes and glances back and forth between Nines and Fowler. He shakes his head and tucks the hand towel into the back waist of his jeans, muscle memory that he doesn't seem fully aware of.

"Where you went wrong," he tells Fowler, "is you brought me on in the first place."

" _Don't you fucking start with me,_ " snaps Fowler. " _Get out_."

Gavin does, and doesn't look back. He slams the door behind him hard enough for the lamp chain to rattle like a wind chime. Fowler lifts his aggrieved eyes to the ceiling, though there's nothing much there to answer his prayers but a blotchy water stain on the tiles. Nines can see him aging in real time.

"As I always must," says Fowler, "I apologize for him."

"It's nothing I wasn't expecting," says Nines. "Chef Reed's reputation precedes him."

"I've asked that of myself, you know," says Fowler. "Did I make a mistake hiring him as head chef? There are plenty of good cooks in the city, why did I have to choose the one who has a personal vendetta against my blood pressure?" A slow, meditative exhale. "But I know I didn't make a mistake. I'm sure of it."

"I'll do everything I can to focus his attention on menu development," says Nines.

"Which I appreciate," says Fowler. "Now, as for you. The liquor license situation is still developing. I'm afraid it's something of a catch-22-- we don't have the money for the license or the expansion yet, but we're hoping that the Michelin gamble will pay off and we can slowly make inroads into wine once we stop hemorrhaging funds. I gave you my word on the sommelier position, and I intend to keep that. Provided that we don't all go under before the end of the year."

"I'm grateful for the favor," says Nines.

"Don't think of it as a favor," says Fowler. "You know just as well as I do that floor manager isn't the endgame for you, despite the fact that you'll be phenomenal at it. Listen, if you saw some kind of promise in this place and want to slum it here until we can officially bring you on board as head sommelier, then I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth."

"I look forward to working with everyone here," says Nines, "whether in my capacity as floor manager or as the possible head sommelier. I don't think of it as slumming." Because they're two different things, what he's meant to do and what he has come here for; they're two different kinds of hunger asking to be sated. Wine may be what he's meant to do, but wine can wait. He's here for something else.

"I'm not in this office much," says Fowler, "but get in touch with me if there's any trouble. Feel free to drop by anytime you like before then, get the lay of the land, make yourself comfortable."

"Will do," says Nines. There's a question that has been gnawing at him for a bit, but he only decides to ask it when he has his hand on the doorknob, figuring it would be easier to get a straight answer out of Fowler in person. "Earlier, when you told Chef Reed that the menu didn't feel like his--"

"Gavin's using this menu as a safety net," says Fowler. "We do around a hundred covers a night, and he thinks we'd be doing much less if the menu looked like his."

"A hundred?" repeats Nines. "That's not so bad, is it?"

"It wouldn't be, but our overhead is bleeding us dry," says Fowler. "Then there's the loans. We should be at 150 to break even, or thereabouts. Somehow, it turns out, we're simultaneously slammed and yet not doing enough. Not a good combination for keeping Gavin's mood up."

"Is it a bad menu?" asks Nines.

"No, it's fine," says Fowler. "It's solid nouvelle cuisine, and it's original _enough_. Just the kind of lackluster original where you can tell his heart's not in it. That asshole thinks I went through all the trouble of hiring him just for him to do a shit impression of someone else."

"Whose impression?" asks Nines. "Whose menu does it look like?"

Fowler steeples his fingers together, in the aspect of a man who has recently quit smoking and regretted it too many times to count.

"Hank Anderson's," he says.

  
  


## III.

Sunday, the restaurant is closed until five. _Yes, brunch makes bank,_ Fowler said when Nines pointed it out. _But since we can't hire a brunch crew, Gavin would have to do brunch-- and I can barely convince him to come into work at all, let alone come into work on a weekend morning. Don't think I haven't brought it up._ This, as a rule, was what the status quo seemed to be at Les Mignardises; everyone knew very well what was good for them -- full bar, weekend brunch, a better menu -- but they neither had the necessary funds to make the changes, nor could figure out how to drag Gavin on board with any plan.

Nines has already familiarized himself with the personnel file, and is planning to spend Sunday morning quietly roaming the vacant floor, working out optimal traffic flow and drafting a speculative layout for how the bar would be positioned within the space. A lull before the inevitable crush of Monday. So he doesn't expect the staff entrance door to fly open as soon as he reaches for the doorknob, or for someone to storm out into the alleyway, knocking his shoulder hard enough for him to stumble back. Nines watches them head for the street in a fuming rage; he's surprised to see that it's not Gavin, who would otherwise have been his top pick for "most likely to show up in a state of physical belligerence at an unexpected moment." Interestingly, Nines finds that he doesn't recognize the person -- even though they were using the staff entrance to the building -- which means it must have been a staff member not listed in the personnel files he was given -- which means that they were already slated to be taken off the payroll -- slated to be sacked, by the point that the files were put together -- _which means,_ Nines thinks, LED whirling, _they must have been fired just moments ago._ That would explain the anger, their presence at the restaurant on a Sunday morning.

As a point of more significant consequence, the further conclusion to draw from this is that the person who fired them is inside the building still. Since Fowler intended to be away for the weekend, and since Nines has not assumed personnel duties just yet-- _it's Gavin_ , realizes Nines. _Gavin is here_. But when he walks by the back office, there's no spill of light around the doorframe, or any trace of human shuffling to indicate that anyone might be within. As he passes through the kitchen and approaches the floor of the dining room, he hears a set of voices drifting from beyond the divider curtain.

"--too much?" Gavin is asking.

"Probably a little too much," says a woman. _Tina Chen,_ Nines supplies himself from the personnel list. _Sous-chef_. Gavin makes a muffled noise in response, and Tina continues, "But it's over now. It's done."

Nines shifts cautiously in the shadowed corridor, until Gavin and Tina are angled in the sliver of the room visible between the curtain and the wall. He can't quite figure out why he feels the need to stay hidden, just that this seems like a private moment; but why he doesn't then turn around and leave them to their privacy instead-- that, he finds even more difficult to explain. As difficult to explain as his decision to seek employment at Les Mignardises in the first place. _You're curious_ , Connor told him, looking equal parts delighted and concerned by the revelation. _Am I?_ asked Nines. _Is that good?_ Connor only said, _It's you,_ so he takes Connor at his word and names it curiosity, this itch to follow his feet.

"I didn't mean it to go like that," says Gavin. He's sitting side by side with Tina at a four-top banquette, slouching like he wants to disappear into the back cushions. He fidgets with a silverware roll-up until it comes loose in his hand, cutlery scattering across the table.

"I know," says Tina.

"Ben shouldn't have even told me," says Gavin. _Ben Collins, the patissier._ "Would have saved us all a lot of trouble."

"Of course Ben had to tell you," she says. "That guy was skimming off the tip line, Gavin. That's not something we let happen. Jesus, you know all of this already."

"I should have done it better," he mutters.

"Okay, sure," she says. "Did you _need_ to call him a dumbass fuckup that was going to get his grubby hands stuck in the wrong pockets someday and end up knifed to death in gutter water like he deserves? No, not really. Did you _need_ to tell him that the only good thing he ever did for his kids was to lose custody over them? Also no, not really. So could you have done it better? Yes, probably, but-- like I said, it's done."

Gavin lists until the back of his head knocks audibly against the beadboard wall, and drapes the cloth napkin over his face. The corner of it flutters when he speaks.

"It's just," he says, "I know what it's like. That's all."

Tina doesn't answer, and reaches instead to fiddle with one of the stray forks on the table.

"Sometimes you know you're fucking up so bad," he says, "but you just-- watch yourself do it. You know? You just keep getting into the till. You lie about the supply truck. Or you watch yourself shoot up and you think, _god, look at this stupid fucking son of a bitch,_ and you just keep doing it and you don't know how to stop. You start hoping that someone or something else will _make_ you stop, or that maybe, hopefully, if you're not careful--"

"Gavin," she cuts in, sharply. "That's not the same thing."

"I'm just saying," he continues, "I know what it's like to get in your own way."

"But see, you came out on the other side," she says. "It's like that for a lot of people we had to let go. If getting fired is what finally gives them a push in the right direction, then-- that's something. Getting fired is still shitty, I don't have to tell you that, but the alternative could have been so much worse."

"Would it have been worse?" asks Gavin.

Tina coils and uncoils in an instant like a spring, drawing her legs up under her. She snatches the napkin from his face and crumples it up in her fist.

"I swear to god," she says, "I'm going to fucking kill you. Stop it."

He looks at her for a long moment, at the shaking of her hand, the tightness in her jaw. Then he rubs at the back of his neck and sits up a little straighter.

"Sorry," he says. "I didn't mean that."

"You say a lot of shit you don't mean." She throws the napkin back in his face and crosses her arms. "I'm sorry too. I'm the sous, this should have been my responsibility."

"It's not," he says. "That's the deal we made. You come with me, and I do personnel. I dragged you into this shithole, I have to hold up my end of the bargain."

"I know you don't like it," she says, softly.

"No one _likes_ it," he says.

"But at least--" she begins. It might be that she thinks of Nines, the new managerial hire, and glances toward the back office; maybe she spots the glow of his LED behind the curtain folds. Maybe Nines shifts his foot and the sound carries through the empty hall. Whatever it is, Tina tilts her head and calls out, "Hello?"

"What the fuck?" demands Gavin, twisting in his seat. "Someone's here?"

Nines clears his throat and steps out from behind the curtains, opting to make a clean breast of it. The bareness of the dining room around him feels incriminating.

"Chef," he says, with a nod. "Sous-chef."

"This fucking asshole," spits Gavin. "Well? How's your sneaking around working out? Run off and tell Fowler you did a great fucking job, you stuck your nose in where it doesn't belong and you saw I got that dumb shit fired like he asked me to. He wants proof, you've got it."

"You mistake me," says Nines. "I came in to calculate server traffic flow."

"Of course you did," says Gavin, rising from his seat. "What a fucking coincidence."

It's a bind. Nines didn't come to pry -- and certainly didn't come to pry at Fowler's request -- but he also can't deny that he lingered when he shouldn't have. Peered out from around the corner without exactly knowing why. _You're curious_ , he hears Connor say, and this time it sounds like censure. His LED spins yellow. At Nines's hesitation, Gavin leans forward like he's going to lunge at him, until Tina places a hand on his arm.

"RK900," she says, "it's good to meet you. We were just leaving."

"I apologize for intruding," says Nines. "I'll see you tomorrow."

Tina is more or less hauling Gavin out the door, but Gavin manages to yell over his shoulder, "Looking forward to sacking your tin ass," before she pushes him outside and kicks the door shut. The wooden frame shudders with the force of it.

Left alone in the sudden stillness, Nines picks up the silverware strewn across the table and folds them back into the napkin to take to the kitchen. If curiosity was the desire to learn more, was he happy at having learned what he did? Did his knowledge satisfy him? Gavin breathing out, his face shrouded in cloth, _maybe, hopefully, if you're not careful--_

  
  


## IV.

Half an hour to the start of Thursday service, and Nines is going over the specials with the waitstaff. He's in the middle of a perfectly innocuous sentence -- "Hamachi crudo with slivers of breakfast radish and a yuzu kosho aioli, hamachi being yellowtail, as you know, and yuzu kosho--" when the door to Fowler's office bangs open with a singular fury that clearly signals it as Gavin's work.

" _\--to do my fucking job for me,_ " yells Gavin's voice, sure enough, from the other side of the divider curtain.

They hear the sound of Fowler yelling back every bit as loudly, "-- _if you did your fucking--_ " before the door slams closed again, making the servers jump.

Nines clears his throat.

"Are you needed in the back?" asks a server ( _Colin, third week on the job_ ).

"No," says Nines. "Our yuzu kosho is made in-house. It's a blend of yuzu, chili pepper -- we use bird's eye -- and salt, pounded into a paste and gently fermented. We balance out the heat with a drizzle of grassy extra-virgin olive oil."

In truth, he knows what it's about already. There was a trickle of irregularity in the books. Items mysteriously vanishing in the fifty steps from the supply truck to the inventory, a discrepancy that felt like the high-pitched grind of metal on metal, ringing through his head insistently until he could pinpoint its source. This, he supposed, was a part of what was meant when Fowler said _phenomenal at being floor manager_. A comprehensive view of the restaurant's ebbs and flows, a near-physical aversion to what was out of place.

It was an ex-employee. Nines tracked him down and spoke to him, persuasive in only the way that six feet of sculpted intimidation could be. But the thorn in all of this was that Gavin always met the trucks himself; he had a hand in the whole mess, though Nines doubted that it extended so far as splitting the illicit proceeds with the ex-employee. That didn't seem his style. _I know what it's like_ , Gavin had said, a little muffled through the napkin. _That's all._

So what Nines had reported to Fowler in the fullness of disclosure, Fowler had in turn disclosed to Gavin. This was the chain of command. This was how you tied up the loose ends and plugged the leaks. How you kept the ship tidy to keep it afloat, how you brought order to a house in ruins, and so what if the cost was--

"RK900," Colin is saying. "The pasta."

"--The pasta," repeats Nines, blinking back to himself. "We have an agnolotti of rabbit in a brown butter sauce, garnished with pine nuts and lightly fried sage leaves."

The cost is coming face to face with Gavin in a white-hot rage at the end of the shift, when Nines meets him in the kitchen to report on the day's service. For the week so far, everyone in the small kitchen crew has remained behind for clean-up -- Tina, Ben, and Maddie the garde-manger -- but they're all conspicuously absent, just him and Gavin in the kitchen, with the traces of service still scattered all over the countertops.

"You meddling piece of shit," says Gavin.

"Chef," says Nines, like a greeting.

"Bet you're real proud of yourself," says Gavin, his shoulders tense.

"Pride is immaterial," says Nines. "I'm doing my job, the way I'm meant to."

"Your job," says Gavin. "Big fucking hero over here."

"I have to give you the rundown on service," says Nines. "Then I'll get out of your way."

" _No_ ," snaps Gavin. His hands clench around the metal edge of the station behind him. "You stay the fuck put until we've made a few things clear. You don't get to come into my house and knock shit around and tell me you're just doing your fucking _job_."

Nines feels a tinge of irritation begin to creep over him, that Gavin is being so unreasonable about this when even he must be completely aware that Nines has done the right thing. Perhaps, Nines thinks, unreasonable _because_ he is completely aware.

"We don't need to agree on how to run this restaurant," says Nines, "but I respect your direction over the kitchen. In turn, I would like you to respect the fact that I'm trying to keep us from going under."

"You think this is why we're going under?" Gavin demands. "Because a crate of potatoes ended up somewhere else?"

"No, Chef," says Nines. The whine of metal on metal starts to hum through the space behind his eyes. It was so difficult, this business of coming to terms, when it didn't have to be. Gavin was making it difficult. "We're going under because you think you're doing people favors, when really all you're doing is keeping them off your back."

The look on Gavin's face might have given Nines some satisfaction, but for the noise in his head. Like a freighter running aground, scraping its hull raw, beaching where it wasn't supposed to.

"We're going under because you don't _really_ know how to look out for people," Nines hears himself say. "And we're going under because you don't listen when you're told that you're wrong. You don't listen."

"--If you don't shut the fuck up _right now_ ," Gavin begins, a low warning, but Nines feels some force of inertia inside him slide out of his grasp. Like a freighter running aground.

"This is your fault, Gavin," he says in a rush, eyes fixed on the floor between them. "This is the mess you've made. If they knew that you would help, truly _help_ , things would be different. Don't you see that? But you never help. All you ever seem to be able to do is look the other way, instead of--"

Out of the corner of his eye, Nines sees the swing coming. He grabs Gavin's wrist before the punch lands, a grip so unforgiving that Gavin struggles with it for only a moment before his anger turns from explosive to guarded.

"You androids," spits Gavin, "you think you know all the fucking answers."

"We do," says Nines.

"Newsflash, you fucking don't," says Gavin. His arm stays where it is, but a tremor runs through his closed fist. "You don't know everything. Maybe I don't either, but at least I know that I don't."

"This isn't a philosophical argument," Nines says, sharp.

Instead of letting go, he tightens his grip and can't explain why. It's an unwelcome pattern, these thousand perplexities -- him around Gavin -- only that he needs Gavin to see his side of it and doesn't know how to make him, and in that moment, his hand around Gavin's wrist feels like the closest thing they have to a connection.

"You _don't listen_ ," repeats Nines and doesn't let go, until Gavin hisses through his teeth, brows knitted in pain and still -- _still, Gavin_ \-- refusing to back down. _What's all the fight in you for?_ Nines knows how easy it would be to keep pouring steady force into his grip, squeezing until his fingertips meet his palm; when he pictures the bones in Gavin's wrist grinding together, splintering apart into shards, it's not with any desire for the outcome but with the cold certainty that he is capable of it. _But what's all the violence in me for?_ Why was he built like this, if not to do the things that he could do? In something like a frenzy, Nines sees the hot glow of his own LED echoed back in Gavin's eyes, a searing ring of--

"-- _Spill on aisle four_ ," Tina shouts from the floor. " _RK900?_ "

Scalded, Nines lets Gavin's wrist drop, and stumbles a step back.

"Yes," he calls back, "Sous-chef."

" _Where do we keep the mops around here?_ " Tina yells.

Nines, made of wires as he is, holds his breath. The kitchen settles into a ragged silence, and in the anxious bitterness of it all -- neither of them quite willing to look at each other -- Gavin slowly raises his hand and points to the supply closet.

The spill is just water. Nines says as much, "Sous-chef, this is just water," dabbing at it with the mop as Tina tucks the plastic bottle back into her bag.

"You can still slip on water," says Tina. "Achtung, baby."

"I suppose that's true," he says half-heartedly. He glances toward the back of the house, unsure of what's left to be gained if he returns to the kitchen.

"Sorry," Tina cuts in. "Could you help me out with this?"

"But the spill's already--" begins Nines.

"Tell me about your best practices in floor sanitation," she says, her smile bright and taut.

Of course, by the time she scurries out the front door with a chirped _thanks, better be on my way then_ , Gavin is gone and the kitchen is cleared. The pans gleaming back in their places, trails of powdered sugar wiped from the counters. Like nothing happened there at all; and still, in Nines's ears, the lingering yaw of something amiss.

  
  


## V.

Friday service is headed to well above a hundred covers. It's outrageous that a night this busy still won't offset overhead and loans, but restaurants are bad business to begin with. Fowler knows. Nines suspects that if it weren't Les Mignardises, Fowler would have just found another hobby to drive him into an early grave.

 _Nothing like the looming prospect of a heart attack to keep me young_ , said Fowler. He winced as he said it, so maybe it was an essentially human quality, this unwillingness to admit to yourself the things you knew the most to be right.

Part of Nines's purview as floor manager is to take on any expediting duties as necessary. It's a more pressing need today then it has been for the week so far; the servers are doing their level best, but Nines senses that some sort of intervention is in order to keep the diners from starting to realize that their meals take time to prepare. He pushes past the divider curtain and the frenetic whirl in the kitchen immediately floods out to meet him, an almost tangible fever that thickens as he approaches the pass.

From her garde-manger station, Maddie spots him first.

"Five-o," she quips.

She's drowned out in the clatter and sizzle, which gives Nines a few rare moments just to watch. It's a sort of luxury to play tourist, taking in the scramble of the kitchen without it pausing to meet him. _Organized chaos_ , one might call it, except Nines isn't too positive about the _organized_. A billow of steam mushrooms spectacularly over the range, and he hears Tina yelp in surprise from the other side of the cloud.

"Fuck, Gavin," she shouts. "My pores are now open and _seared off my face_."

"It wasn't done depressurizing," Gavin yells back. Nines follows his voice to him, where he's briskly butter-basting a slab of steak, sparing Tina the briefest of glances over his shoulder. A twinge of something rankles at Nines, like a splinter left unchecked.

" _Now_ you tell me," says Tina. "Jesus, to live through such constant attempts on my life."

Gavin shakes his head, and through the window of the pass -- framed like a portrait in stainless steel -- the gesture seems soft. With his pen behind his ear and smudges across his chef's whites, hot with adrenaline, his hands never still, this is Gavin with the current in him. _Alive_ , thinks Nines. That's an odd and hollow reminder; _this lightning is what I drain from him_. _This is how he can be, if not for me._

"Hey," Maddie tries again, louder. "RK900 is here."

Gavin visibly starts. In the split second that their eyes meet, before Gavin whips his head back to the skillet, Nines sees his shutters come down.

"Table 6 is waiting on two duck," says Nines. "Medium-rare."

Gavin doesn't answer, intent on the froth of the butter.

"Chef," Maddie prompts him.

"What? You heard the expo," says Gavin, flat. "Fire two duck, medium-rare."

"Yes, Chef," says Tina. "Chef, maybe this time Chef won't make me redo the dish by dragging his sleeves through the coulis, Chef."

"That's not on me," Gavin shoots back. "Maybe if Ben didn't plate the coulis like a goddamn gravy boat oil tanker capsized off the Gulf Coast--"

"It's a metaphor," shouts Ben over the sound of three oven timers going off in succession. "For the capsizing restaurant. The coulis is Fowler's retirement savings."

"I'm heading back to the floor," says Nines. Maddie salutes him with the paring knife in her hand.

"Well, _I_ think the coulis looks nice," she says.

"Only Maddie understands me," says Ben. "Do you think there are a lot of crew mutinies on oil tankers? Asking for a friend."

They're two different things, what he's meant to do and what he has come here for. He didn't come to be head sommelier. He arrived at Les Mignardises prickling with an itch that Connor called _curiosity_ , a parched need to understand the kind of person who could make a dish _like that._ Nothing done in halves. Gavin in exile at Zabuton, 30 miles outside of Detroit, the crackle scent of salt and smoke hanging heavy in the dining room, even before he emerged from the kitchen with a plate full of slaughter.

Nines stands in the doorway to their kitchen like a state-of-the-art lemon, uncertain how he ought to make his presence known. Clean-up is long since finished, and the rest of the crew has left; it's just Gavin going over the checklist one last time. Still with his eyes on the clipboard, Gavin turns to face the door, and lifts his hand to the pen behind his ear.

\-- _His wrist_ , thinks Nines, his stomach turning.

Beneath the rolled-up edge of his stained jacket sleeve, Gavin's right wrist is wrapped in stark bruises. The outline of it is sickeningly distinct. Four fingers, a thumb.

 _What's all the violence in me for?_ It strikes Nines that this is perhaps the first time in his life that he has been -- _embedded_ , perhaps -- been a part of something that needed him to make a difference. This kitchen crew, this restaurant. Gavin. _And these,_ he thinks, _are the marks I'm leaving._ These, the bloodied consequences of the things that he could do.

But just because he _could_ do them -- just because it was much too easy for him to go too far, that didn't mean that he was -- _you are not the things that you are capable of_ , he tells himself, like committing a lesson to memory. A small, parenthetical part of him protests in response: _What are you, then?_ Gavin spits, a mouthful of venom, _you don't know everything._

"You just going to stand there like a coat rack?" asks Gavin.

Nines flinches. That's from the real Gavin, leaning crookedly with his hip against the prep station. He rolls his eyes when Nines doesn't answer.

"Or you going to report on service," he says, "so I can go the fuck home already?"

"--I," falters Nines.

Suspiciously, Gavin looks down at where Nines is still staring, to the mottle of his wrist.

"Shit," he swears under his breath, unfolding his sleeves in a flurry.

Nines clears his throat and feels the need to look away. The coulis has seeped into the fabric, but there's a jagged berry slash where it must have dragged through the first duck for table 6. Why go through service with his sleeves rolled down? Why not make an indignation of it, _fire the new floor manager before he goes full murder machine?_ It's Gavin that his crew knows, not Nines. 

"The report," says Gavin.

"Chef," says Nines, at last, "you should put some ice on that."

"Jesus fucking Christ," says Gavin. "The report, you son of a bitch."

In the stillness of the small of the night, Nines makes his way home by rote and brings up the memory of Gavin's bruises, over and over again. Four fingers, a thumb. His fingers, his thumb. Underneath the disquiet, or churned through the disquiet too thoroughly for him to be able to push it aside, there's a streak of a thing that burns. A fascination.

 _Gavin can be marked_ , that burning thing tells him. _I'm-- making an impression_.

 _You're curious,_ Connor said.

_Is that good?_


	3. Poisson

## VI.

"I'm just saying, there's always a place for you at The 313," says Hank. "You remember that. When you finally realize that you have better things to do than indulge Fowler's dreams of financial self-destruction, don't even think about it twice. Just quit. Set the whole place on fire as you walk out."

"Hank," says Connor, "please don't make any incriminating statements."

"But you remember that," Hank tells Nines.

Nines nods and tears off more of the country loaf. Connor's, he could have guessed it easily by the meticulous crackle of the crust, even if he hadn't walked through the door to the Anderson household to be greeted with the sight of Connor balancing a dutch oven in each hand. _One at a time,_ Hank was shouting from the kitchen.

"Good bread," says Nines.

"Thank you." Connor beams. "The cacciatore is delicious, Hank."

"Of course it is," says Hank. "If I wanted to hear pleasantries about my cooking, I'd go print out a sheaf of Yelp reviews."

"Have more wine," Connor says to Nines, and makes it sound like _this is what I have to deal with._ The wine is an older Brunello that wraps around the cacciatore with a savory, insistent tannic structure: oregano, leather, and roses. It's a treat. Nines doesn't need to be offered twice.

"I thought I was losing my mind, first time I saw an android eat," says Hank. "But I guess _not needing to do it_ and _not being able to do it_ are two different things, is that right?"

"Correct," says Nines. "We're equipped with robust internal systems for analyzing and breaking down any and all organic compounds ingested through oral channels."

"See," says Hank, "now I realize that I much prefer pleasantries about my cooking to troubleshooting manuals about your internal systems."

"He's squeamish," explains Connor, which earns him an impassive glare from Hank.

"So," says Hank, "where are you staying, Nines? You found a place?"

"I'm at a studio within walking distance to the restaurant," says Nines. "It's in a surprisingly quiet neighborhood, and it overlooks a park. I enjoy the atmosphere."

"A studio?" asks Hank. "You know, if you need us to spot you for a bigger place--"

"That's kind but not required," says Nines. "A studio serves my needs perfectly well."

"It just doesn't sit right with me," says Hank. "Do you even have a bed in there? A living area? Please tell me you furnished it, and you're not going home every night to a barren apartment with nothing on the walls."

"That's what _you_ think a home should look like," Connor interrupts, gently. "We can surround ourselves with things that please us, yes, but we don't share human preconceptions about what makes a domicile worth inhabiting."

"So it's a box with a charging station?" asks Hank.

"If androids are just as valid a form of life as human beings," says Connor, "it challenges us to understand that there are android ways of living that might not be desirable to you."

Hank mulls this over, stabbing distractedly at his chicken with a fork. It looks like stubbornness to Nines, but Connor -- being Connor -- seems to know better.

"Androids have preferences too," he says, and Hank glances up in interest. "For example, we favor layouts that provide order to information and stimuli. I find corridors to be much more navigable than wide-open spaces."

"No lofts," agrees Nines.

"This," says Connor, "is the main way in which we are not like Roombas."

Hank chokes on his wine, and coughs into his napkin in some complicated admixture of guilt, surprise, and reluctant amusement.

"Okay," he says, when he recovers. "As long as you're making it work for you. I'd hate to think you moved out for nothing."

"I promise that I will act in my own self-interest," says Nines.

"And the job?" asks Connor. "It's treating you well?"

This is a more nettlesome matter. Nines knows that his LED goes yellow as he considers his answer, and that Connor and Hank are both looking at it whir, trying to guess at the source of his hesitation.

"The job is agreeable," says Nines, to assuage them. "My duties are achievable and clearly delineated. Fowler has been supportive of my operational decisions. I have a good relationship with the front-of-house staff, and most of the kitchen staff as well."

"That word, _most,"_ says Hank. "That tells me a lot about who the problem is."

Connor and Hank have known Gavin for much longer than Nines has. Hank, especially; nobody seems particularly eager to share the full contours of that story, but Nines knows that it stretches back further than Connor's arrival on the scene, before The 313 took its current form with Connor as Hank's sous-chef. Even before the advent of androids, perhaps.

"What kind of a person," asks Nines, slowly, "is Chef Reed?"

"Gavin? Gavin isn't a person," Hank grunts. "He's the clamor of a thousand pots and pans loosely poured into a sack of skin."

Connor's mouth twitches, which Nines recognizes as him trying to hold back laughter.

"Is he _actually_ giving you trouble?" asks Hank.

This, too, is difficult to answer. But the truth of it is that Nines is successfully making the changes he deems are imperative for Les Mignardises; Gavin's unhappiness is no material obstacle to Nines doing his job. In the end, Gavin was the one that walked away with the consequences of their disagreement on his skin.

"No," decides Nines. "He isn't. Can I ask a question, Connor?"

Connor tilts his head.

There are a lot of ways to phrase this. _When did you learn that you were capable of --_ or, _how did you figure out what you could be, if you weren't_ \-- but Nines looks into his glass of Brunello and none of those questions sound right. He shakes his head.

"It's not a question," he says. "I think I-- hurt him."

"How possibly?" Hank frowns. "Did you insult his knifework?"

Nines shakes his head again. Connor is looking at him, still with his head tilted. The comlink between them is conspicuously silent. Connor, canny as always in these matters, can tell that what Nines can't say is not for the lack of words to describe it. It comes as a relief, Connor's choice to hang back until Nines has puzzled it out for himself.

"Whatever it is," says Hank, "if it gives him a kick in the ass then it's a good thing. I haven't been, but I remember the reviews, he knows he has work to do. What did Markus write about Les Mignardises again?"

"That he _relished several courses of very palatable dishwater,"_ quotes Connor.

"That's right," says Hank. "Then Kara, just a couple weeks later."

_"I've never been disappointed to not be punched in the face,"_ says Connor, _"but I surmise that this must be what it feels like."_

"Because they were all at the pop-up that we were at," says Hank. "At Zabuton, with the tartare. You remember?"

Nines has never stopped remembering.

"They know what he's capable of," continues Hank. "If you can get him to stop dragging his goddamn feet about it, you'd be doing this entire industry a favor. Gavin Reed is what you get if you staple a toque blanche to the forehead of a feral dog, but his food shouldn't be boring people. That's just not right."

"Fowler is aware of the situation," says Nines. "The overhaul of the menu is a top priority item-- the hope is that my intervention with personnel might restore some creative impetus to Chef Reed."

Hank dabs reflectively at the cacciatore with his bread.

"It's just," he says, "that asshole's always getting in his own way. So that's Fowler's biggest concern, then? The menu? Gavin isn't delivering because he has some sort of creative constipation?"

"That is my understanding," says Nines.

"That's good," says Hank, half to himself. "If that's what Fowler's worried about, that's good."

_Maybe, hopefully,_ Gavin said, _if you're not careful--_

"I think," says Nines, taking the long way around as Hank seemed to prefer, "that Chef Reed has things under control."

"Good," Hank says again.

Connor pours himself another glass of wine.

"I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying work, Nines," he says and smiles, impeccably bland. The comlink stays silent.

  
  


## VII.

Nines is frowning at the ceiling and contemplating the merits of putting in an order of new light bulbs -- maybe something slightly closer to 3000K, didn't this rose gold make the place feel musty? -- when he's interrupted by a faint ruckus from the parking lot. 

"Tin can," Gavin is yelling. "Get over here and make yourself useful."

Mentally bracketing the matter of the lightbulbs for further consideration, Nines heads out back. It's the late morning hour that Chris makes his supply rounds with the specialty ingredients, and sure enough, Nines finds his emblazoned _Miller & Miller Provisions _van pulled up to the alleyway. Gavin is there by the van's loading doors.

"Hey, Maitre d'," Chris says, parting the vinyl panels from inside the van. "What are you up to?"

"I'm thinking about lighting," says Nines.

"Lord's work," says Chris.

Gavin turns around gingerly, and Nines sees that he's cradling two dozen eggs in his apron. Enchanted by the delicate bloom of their shells, night-sky speckles on terracotta, sage, and lilac, Nines forgets for a moment the distance that he's been keeping. He peers at the eggs from over the lip of Gavin's apron.

"Yeah," says Gavin, "they're nice." He also seems too pleased with the eggs to remember to be combative.

"Great little bunch of Easter Eggers they have there," says Chris. "Got the run of the land, too. Makes me want to either start up a farm or become a chicken."

"One may be easier than the other," says Nines.

"You got me there," says Chris. "Okay, Chef, what else on the list?"

"Tina has the rest of the stuff-- so that just leaves the lango," says Gavin, and jerks his head towards Nines. "Can he take it?"

"Sure can," says Chris, and disappears inside the van.

"Are chickens very difficult to raise?" Nines asks Gavin.

"What? Yes," says Gavin. "Don't you dare start a hatchery in the back office."

It's almost companionable, speaking like this. Chris drags out an insulated polysterene box, popping open the lid to show off several plump rows of langoustines, their gawky claws clasped politely together. Nines receives the cargo, hefting it into his arms with no big trouble.

"Guess you're not completely useless," Gavin says to Nines. "And this way, you can keep an eye on me and all my felonious misdeeds."

"Oh, come off it," Tina's voice interrupts from inside the van. She thrusts her disembodied head out from between the vinyl strips, the better to make her point. "There's a lot of very measurable stuff that RK900 has been doing. Keeping in contact with the ex-employees during the job search process? Putting them in touch with openings around the city? That helps a lot, they'll tell you that. Isn't that right, RK900? You getting any Edible Arrangements in the mail?"

"Just doing my job," says Nines.

"He's so modest," says Tina. "Anyway, Gavin, you said yourself that things have been easier since RK900 has been here. I heard you."

This, Nines doesn't expect.

"You said that?" he asks Gavin.

Slowly, like the trickling warmth of the tide coming in, the flush rises in Gavin's cheeks. He doesn't answer, just stomps away as belligerently as he can with two dozen eggs nestled in his apron, while Tina and Chris exchange their animated chatter. Spellbound still, Nines follows Gavin with his eyes until he stomps into the staff entrance and disappears from sight.

Two different things, what Nines is meant to do and what he has come here for.

_I came here for you,_ he thinks.

  
  


## VIII.

The way that Hank said it was with a disapproval verging on horror, _a box with a charging station,_ but Connor had the right of it. Nines likes his apartment. And what Connor said after that, _we can surround ourselves with things that please us,_ that was right too; Nines walks into the tiled kitchen alcove of his studio and stops in front of the only appliance on the counter, a wine cooler.

Today, a Sancerre. He likes varietals. There is an art to the blend, sure, and a pleasure to unraveling each individual strand in that sort of tapestry. But the candor of varietals charms him.

Or perhaps candor is too simple a word for it. The Sancerre is straw-pale in his glass, shaded to almost a tinge of green around its edges. If not candor, then a different sort of riddle from the one that blends tended to pose. Not _what grape am I_ , but: _This is the grape I mean. How do I say what I mean?_ That this Sancerre means the same thing as a Marlborough, but that they would say it with such different words -- that a Sauvignon Blanc could be gunflint as well as bell pepper musk, lime as much as pineapple -- that's the riddle he keeps coming back to.

So it's the candor beneath the prevarications of terroir, really. Nines was built to take things apart, whether as an evidence analyst in investigative capacities, as a perfumer teasing an accord to shreds, or as a hobbyist wine aficionado working an aggrieved day job as floor manager at a failing restaurant. That he has ended up as the third of these options had a lot to do with the fact that Connor was already in Hank's orbit by the time Nines came along. Like inheriting a family business by sheer force of habit, Nines fell into food and wine, and found that there was for him nothing half as intriguing as terroir and the tricks it got up to.

(Until Zabuton, when Gavin walked into the room and made even less sense than how a bottle of fermented fruit could taste like a wool sweater.)

Seated at the pass-through of his kitchen, Nines considers the Sancerre. In his experience, people were eager to hear about what wines they could pair with their dinner plans, and were even happy to build their dinners around a wine they had in mind. What usually drew resistance was the prospect that some great wine _needed_ food in order to be any good at all. This Sancerre. It was palpably bred in flint, which makes it elegant; a tall and lean sort of wine, barely any grass to it, even less fruit. Pellucid and rarefied, not unlike the experience of meditating under a waterfall-- it tastes like a pebble pulled from a mountain creek.

But that means that the acidity has nothing to play off of, when it hits the sides of his jaw. Overall the wine is a little too stern, steely and inflexible, with no sense of humor to soften out its edges. _That doesn't mean it's bad._ Nines sucks in a mouthful of air through his teeth, and the space beneath his tongue prickles with bitterness. _All that means is that it's too much of itself. It just needs food._

A Chavignol goat cheese would certainly get the job done, in the way that you could always trust the terroir of the wine to recognize the terroir of the food. It would be a lively pairing, acid up against acid, a bit of cream to bring richness to the minerality of the Sancerre. But from his pass-through perch, Nines can see his untouched stovetop stare back at him. Chavignol, fine, but he wants something created in the kitchen instead. Something gentled with heat, something that has been handled with care.

He hears the phantom silver clatter of a spoon inside a saucepan. Maybe a beurre blanc fish, brisk hands and an uncapped pen tucked behind an ear. Maybe that.

  
  


## IX.

The staff entrance leads to the alleyway where the dumpsters are, which in turn leads to a wider parking lot where the unloading takes place. Nines grows accustomed to helping out with the trek on foot between the lot and the kitchen, crates of produce balanced on each of his shoulders, as Tina holds the door open and enthusiastically cheers him on.

For a secluded area so close to a food service establishment, the alleyway is unusually free of pests. Nines wonders at it more than once, in particular after he notes the conspicuous lack of an exterminator bill on their monthly expenditures. _We used to have them come over every month,_ Fowler explained. _At some point they leveled with me and said they weren't seeing much, so we moved to quarterly, and now we do twice a year._

Nines is nothing if not a fan of abiding by regulations, but it really is quite clean as far as back alleys go, so he lets the matter rest. Because he tends to leave through the front door to lock up, with the kitchen and the back door falling to Gavin's purview, it takes Nines a few weeks before he stumbles on the reason for the tidiness.

On his way back home after service, it occurs to him that he wants to go over Fowler's liquor license dossier, to figure out if there are any ways around Michigan's BYOB laws. He does an about-face and returns to the restaurant, heading for the back door and its shortcut corridor to the office. He figures everyone must have left already; so it startles him to see Gavin out in the darkened alleyway, sitting on an upturned bucket and smoking a cigarette.

"Chef," says Nines, though in his surprise it sounds like a question. _Chef?_

"Gold star," says Gavin.

Nines's eyes move down from Gavin's face to his feet, where the torn corner of a tarp lies heaped with a small mound of food waste. Stock bones, trimmings. Half a dozen or so cats are engrossed in gnawing at the scraps.

"What?" asks Nines.

"Huh?" asks Gavin, in much the same vein.

"I mean--" begins Nines. "...Are those cats?"

"Gold star," says Gavin. "Doing great."

Hesitantly, Nines approaches the tarp -- as wary of spooking away Gavin as he is the cats -- but everyone stays put right where they are, the cats too occupied with their meal and Gavin intent on his cigarette. Nines sits back on his heels with the leftover feast between him and Gavin, and listens to the quiet snuffle of the cats as they dine.

"Are they on the payroll?" asks Nines.

"No," says Gavin. "They're independent contractors."

"They do a good job," says Nines, "with the vermin."

"Tell them yourself," says Gavin.

Nines clears his throat. "You do a good job with the vermin," he tells the cats, who steadily refuse to acknowledge the presence of anything else but the banquet spread. It's dim out even for Nines's eyes, but they do all seem like certified strays, a tail or two bobbed and patchy coats all around. Some ears are more obviously tipped than others.

"What are their names?" asks Nines.

"I don't know," says Gavin. "They're feral."

"Doesn't mean they can't have names," says Nines.

"I asked," says Gavin, "but they didn't tell me."

_"Chef,"_ says Nines, markedly unimpressed by his sarcasm. This is a trick that he has picked up from Tina in dealing with Gavin, and it works more often than not. True to form, Gavin relents.

"If I were responsible for them, then yeah," he says. "But like this-- what business is it of mine, anyway? All I do is feed them trash at the end of the day. Real gourmet fucking trash, I'm sure they don't know the difference, but so what? That's it."

The explanation leaves some coherence to be desired, which Nines identifies as discomfort on Gavin's part. He waits, silent, until Gavin talks it out for himself.

"They're fine the way they are, probably," continues Gavin. "They get their food, they show up the next night, so they're okay. I'm barely home anyway, I wouldn't be able to take care of them in the way--" He gestures with his cigarette, struggling for a phrase that eludes him. "That doesn't give me the kind of-- I'm not-- it doesn't feel right for me to name them," he finishes, at last.

The streetlights are blue and cold out on the pavement, but when Gavin lights another cigarette and takes a thirsty drag, the cherry of it glows and sizzles like a drop of water in a scalding pan. That feels better to Nines, the warmth of the shadows cast in the hollows of Gavin's cheeks. Nines reaches out to run an index finger down the spine of a ginger tom.

"You can call me Nines," he says.

"What the hell?" Gavin grimaces. "The f-- what's that about?"

Nines shrugs.

"Like I fucking would," says Gavin.

He breathes out, and the smoke wreathes him for a moment, achingly fleeting.

"Nines," he murmurs to himself, like testing out the sound of it in his mouth.

Assembled in deadly precision and all the scientific hubris that money could buy, Nines -- a triumph of modern engineering and a computational monument -- feels the pump of his heart skip a beat.

  
  


## X.

The amount of onions on the prep station is reaching _Julie and Julia_ proportions. Nines smells it before he sees it, but the sheer mountainous sight of it is alarming on its own terms. Gavin is behind the cutting board and gamely adding to the pile, slower at half-blinded than he would be otherwise, with Tina perched on a stool next to him.

"Please don't cry," coos Tina, dabbing under Gavin's eyes with her side towel. "I can't bear to see you cry."

"Stop," says Gavin, wetly.

"Hi, RK900," says Tina. "What's kicking?"

"I'm not sure anymore," says Nines.

"Seriously," Gavin barks at Tina, though his choked voice deprives it of force, "go away. You're done with your prep work, come back at four if this is your idea of helping."

"You're no fun when you're being defeated by alliums," says Tina, and hops off the stool.

"Go home to your wife and kids," yells Gavin.

Tina shakes her head sadly, maintaining eye contact as she walks backwards into the freezer. Nines watches her go as he processes this last retort.

His LED must flicker yellow, because Gavin appends a clarification. "Wife, yes," he says. "Kids, no."

Nines turns back to Gavin and tilts his head in mute inquiry. _And you?_

Gavin rolls his reddened eyes and sets down his knife. He pointedly flips Nines off with the empty ring fingers on both of his hands, which is no easy feat and must take a tremendous amount of discipline.

"Outstanding," says Nines. "If only you applied yourself similarly to other tasks."

"RK900," calls Tina. She's poking her head out of the walk-in freezer, swaddled in an insulated jacket with the collar turned up. "Let's stop bothering Gavin, he has to chop all those onions or he can't go to the prince's ball tonight. Come do inventory with me."

"Yes," agrees Gavin, "please everyone fuck off."

The temperature in the freezer unit registers as appropriately brisk. Tina rubs the bridge of her nose and looks up at Nines, who is aware of the ambient chill but unaffected in function.

"Pretty neat," she says. "It really doesn't bother you at all?"

"Not unless it becomes cold enough to interfere with circuitry," says Nines.

"They better refund us for this freezer if that happens," says Tina. "I'll probably be dead, so you'll have to contact customer support yourself."

She flexes her fingers to shake off the chill, then taps a long alphanumeric sequence into her tablet, which burbles in acknowledgement. Despite her initial suggestion, Tina doesn't seem to need any help with inventory. She turns over a hunk of pork, scans the barcode with the tablet, and moves on to the next.

"Is the cold unpleasant?" asks Nines.

"Interesting question," says Tina. "I would submit that the cold is _cold."_

"I ask because the process of inventory appears to be one that my abilities are suited to," says Nines. "With some operational modules in place, I could easily keep track of all goods on restaurant premises."

"Well," says Tina, "it would be really easy for me to join an underground fight club and make my living by smacking people around and ripping off my muscle tanks."

"You weigh 120 pounds," says Nines.

"My god!" exclaims Tina. "Who asked you!"

"It is my understanding that underground fight clubs do not have weight classes," offers Nines by way of placation.

"Anyway, my point is that I _could_ do those things," she says, "but that's not my job."

Nines considers this as Tina goes on rummaging through the racks.

"I often find it difficult," he says, "to know the difference between what I can do and what I should do."

"That's so unfortunate," she says, "because I don't trust anyone who doesn't know how to be lazy."

She laughs, her breath blooming in visible dandelion puffs against the cold, which assures Nines that she is only joking. He has noted that she is quick with her conviviality but methodical in her judgment of character; her confidence in him, in turn, is a coveted mark of approval. Once earned -- on the other hand -- her loyalty appears obstinate to a fault. What all this ought to tell him about Gavin, Nines is not certain.

"Here's something," says Tina, frowning at a cut of beef and turning it over in her hands. "Can you do price lookups?"

"Yes," says Nines. "I would be happy to help."

"Let's put you to use," she says. "Ribeye roll, item number 112A."

"Item number 112A," he says. He sees that the price graph of wholesale beef has generally been drawing an incline over the past two weeks, but none so steep as the slope for 112A. "That's $9.67 per pound, Sous-chef."

_"No,"_ she gasps. "Mother of _fuck!"_

_"What?"_ demands Gavin, faintly muffled from outside the freezer.

_"No more deckles for anyone,"_ Tina yells back. "$9.67 a pound? Who authorized this? Oh my god, I authorized it. I killed our COGS, Gavin!"

She dramatically hurls the ribeye roll onto the shelf, where it goes clattering to the back. This, too, Nines recognizes as something only adjacent to the truth, the way that an astonishing amount of human communication tended to be. Les Mignardises was in dire financial straits, that was certain; they were buying on credit from most of their suppliers, save the smaller outfits, like Miller & Miller Provisions. But this was much more Tina's way of expressing dismay over the price of beef, rather than a critical moment in the saga of their insolvency.

"Did you hear me, Gavin?" Tina calls. _"I murdered us."_

"Yeah," Gavin yells back, "but what a way to go."

"You're not wrong," yells Tina.

"Why are you still talking to me?" asks Gavin. "Make her stop, Nines."

Tina stares at Nines, her eyes wide.

_"--Nines?"_ she repeats. The corners of her mouth begin to quirk in mischief, which Nines decides must be put to a swift and sudden end.

"I've just contacted the secretarial android on the supplier side," he says, though in truth he only does so as he announces it. "We'll set up a call to discuss the ribeye situation."

"Sounds good," says Tina, _"Nines."_

She claps him on the shoulder with exaggerated machismo, whistles a scratchy jingle and moves on to the next shelf. _It does sound good,_ thinks Nines, and settles in for the long haul.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While Tina and Nines are hanging out in the walk-in freezer, Gavin is silently screaming with his face buried in the pile of cut-up onions. 'NINES!! I CALLED HIM NINES!!!' he thinks. 'I SAID THE THING!!!'
> 
> Nines loves a good vintage of Heavily Metaphorical Wine.


	4. Entrée

## XI.

In Nines's professional opinion, Fowler's biggest shortcoming as a restaurant owner was the fact that he owned a restaurant. Much of what was happening to Les Mignardises was not his fault; perhaps he was prone to taking risks -- exhibit A, Gavin as chef de cuisine -- but that was arguably the only way to subsist for an enterprise that was risky to begin with. The deck was always stacked against him.

Neither was he wrong to bet on a potential Michelin star as the do-or-die occasion to turn the venture around. Nines thinks he would have done much the same. In fact, Nines struggles to imagine what exactly he would do differently from Fowler; what, other than treading water day after day, he could recommend for a restaurant on the verge of drowning.

"Maybe you wouldn't have lost your temper," Fowler says. His migraine is so loud that it's audible over the phone. "Don't get me wrong, like hell I'm going to dance around when all I'm asking is that he do his goddamn job. But I was-- undiplomatic about it, I guess you could say."

 _My temper,_ thinks Nines, and remembers the bruises around Gavin's wrist.

"Chef Reed has a documented history of strained working relationships," he says instead. "And tensions are bound to run high under financial duress. I'm sorry to hear that your recent exchange went poorly, but it appears that your demeanor is hardly the main issue at hand here."

"It feels like I've been doing nothing but dealing with issues since the day we opened," says Fowler. "Just putting out one fire after another. Something breaks down, something's not up to code, someone gets chewed out and disappears off the map three hours before he has to open for service. For fuck's sake, is Chen around? Does she know where he is?"

"Maybe," says Tina, when Nines calls. "I wouldn't worry about it."

"You wouldn't worry about Chef Reed going missing three hours before service?" asks Nines.

"He's not _missing,"_ she says. "He doesn't want to be found right now. That's different."

"I gather this has happened before," he says.

"It's just not worth it," she says. Behind her, the kitchen bustles with the sounds of Maddie and Ben busy in prep. "It's easier if I just cover for him until he gets it out of his system in a day or so. He doesn't like to talk, when he gets like this."

"That's fine," insists Nines. "He doesn't like me anyway."

"Jesus," says Tina. Her exhale shreds into a burst of static. "Listen, maybe you've noticed, but-- Gavin isn't exactly easy to work with. You know why I've managed to do it for this long? Because I know the space he needs, and he knows mine. I know I can't drag him along with me all the time. That's how we stay friends."

"I'm not trying to be his friend," says Nines. "I'm trying to get him to show up at his place of employment."

"Unbelievable," she says. "No one ever takes my advice. Okay, it's still a service day, so he's probably not at the Milton-- go check the riverfront, get into a fistfight, see if I care. If you're late, I'm putting Fatima in charge of front of house."

"A solid choice," says Nines, "but I promise we won't be late."

"I hope you maim each other beyond recognition," she says.

_Not trying to be his friend,_ but what? Nines finds himself slowing to a stop outside a convenience store. Why, if he can just as well haul Gavin to work by force? This sort of thing -- persuading, making nice -- is what Connor was meant to do, not him. Nines was never built for it. Why, if all he knows is how to tighten his grip, how best to be unkind? The bell on the door chimes cheerily as he exits, in his hand a plastic bag swaying with two onigiri. _If not his friend, then what?_

Nines heads east from Hart Plaza, the glittering stretch of the river to his right. In the midday sun, the water gleams like a knife, Canada a mirage. Families pass him by, children clasped by their small, hot hands, and Nines marvels at how content their upturned faces look. How contained. Is that what a family is, wrapped up and finished in ribbon? Sometimes, when Connor opens the door and Hank is at his most welcoming, when even Sumo is eager to see him, Nines has the sensation of watching their household from the wrong end of a telescope. Miles away, a perfect artifact encased in glass.

 _Then what is it to be otherwise than that,_ Nines wonders. Unenclosed, open to the air like a wound; maybe the whole world is made of families, and everything else is just the spaces in between. Where the ruptures are.

Twenty minutes into his search, past the carousel and the wetlands, Nines spots Gavin in the distance just as he begins to feel a tinge of unease. Gavin is by the lighthouse. That seems like him, to have burrowed deep into that whorl of land looking for some kind of solitude, only to end up with water on all sides, visible from across a harbor. Even before Nines is close enough to make out any of the details, he figures it must be Gavin because of the way he's standing with his elbows on the railing, doing absolutely nothing and going nowhere.

It startles Nines, how unused he is to seeing Gavin in casual clothes. The first time, maybe, since Gavin showed up late to their meeting after crawling out of a dumpster. Even then, they were in the back office of the restaurant; this is Gavin away from the kitchen, stripped of all his context. In his hoodie and jeans, he could be anyone. _Who are you,_ thinks Nines, _when I'm not around?_

What Tina said -- _the space he needs_ \-- it makes a bit more sense then. If Gavin chooses to come down to the riverfront to watch the sunlight ricochet off the water until his eyes hurt, that's his prerogative to do so in perfect anonymity. If he needs an hour or two to _not_ be Chef Reed, to be absolutely no one doing nothing and going nowhere, then why is Nines here on the boardwalk, interrupting it with his clumsy attempts at truce? The bag in his hand gets heavier with every step.

Nines needs to walk all the way around the marina to reach Gavin, but he pauses there for a moment, on the other side of the water.

"Chef," he calls, before he thinks better of it.

Gavin's head shoots up. When he finds Nines across the way, his eyes dart to the path behind him, like he's thinking of making a run for it in however long it would take for Nines to loop around. He seems to recognize that would be a futile effort, and his shoulders slump in resignation. In the beating of the wind, Nines thinks he hears Gavin mutter under his breath: _Figures._

By the time Nines arrives at the lighthouse, Gavin is back to looking out over the water, arms crossed over the railing. There's a cigarette dangling from his lips, but Nines notes that it's unlit.

"Nice weather," says Nines, joining him by the edge.

"Why are you here," asks Gavin.

"You have service in a few hours," says Nines. "I'm here to walk you back to the restaurant."

"Thanks, I know how to get back," says Gavin. He doesn't move.

The river laps at the feet of their concrete promontory, dissolving into delicate spiderwebs of foam. Nines could have turned back, opposite the harbor; but he came anyway, clinging to the uncertain hope that he might at least be no worse company than the silence. That being alone helped, but not being alone could help as well, in its own ungainly way.

 _He doesn't like to talk, when he gets like this._ He shouldn't have to. Nines holds up the convenience store bag, ponderous with his offering.

"When was the last time you ate?" he asks.

Gavin seems to consider this a bizarre enough interjection to merit his full attention. He stares at Nines, then at the bag, then back at Nines, increasingly bewildered with every pass. Nines gives the bag a small shake.

"--Fine," sighs Gavin. He motions impatiently with a hand, _come on._

"Tuna or salmon?" asks Nines.

"Of _what,"_ demands Gavin, which is a fair question. Nines reaches in and comes up holding both onigiri in his hand.

"Tuna or salmon?" asks Nines, again.

"Where the fuck-- salmon," says Gavin. "I guess."

He takes the portion given to him and turns away from the water, sliding down to sit with his back against a post, knees drawn up halfway. Nines places the bag between them for the plastic husks, and takes a seat himself.

As soon as he starts to unwrap the onigiri, he can tell that he has made a terrible mistake. Grains of rice flake away like crumbs, cold and hard and dry, scattering into his lap. The gummy straitjacket of seaweed smudges damply when he presses his thumb into it. As it turns out, these particular rice balls have apparently spent decades languishing away on the refrigerator shelf before Nines walked into the store. The smell of vinegar is overpowering.

Nines coughs, struggling with the unfamiliar feeling of mortification.

Beside him, Gavin clears his throat, and presses his knuckles to his mouth. Nines looks over in concern, only to realize that Gavin is quietly _laughing._

"These are... very bad," says Nines. "I apologize."

"I'm going to file a class-action lawsuit against these people," says Gavin.

"We should drop by on our way back," says Nines. "Sous-chef Chen and Fatima will cover for us while we enact a citizen's arrest."

Gavin tries to extricate his fingers from the seaweed paste, and the whole onigiri instantly disintegrates onto his palms. Still, he funnels the dessicated morsels of rice back into the wrapper, jury-rigging a discouragingly limp ladle that he uses to tip back precarious mouthfuls of a mostly inedible product.

"You don't have to eat that," mumbles Nines.

"Are you fucking kidding? Of course I have to eat it," says Gavin. "This is the worst thing you've ever done."

It is, at that. This isn't exactly the way Nines wanted it to go, but then again, it seems to have done the trick. Gavin's shoulders are looser, and his sullen mood has ebbed away enough for conversation to seem a possibility.

"I'm a sommelier," says Nines, "not a-- convenience store connoisseur."

"Doesn't matter," says Gavin. "Fowler's going to waste you on the floor just the same."

"It's not wasting," protests Nines, though he's surprised at the sentiment behind it. Like Gavin thought Nines was worth something. "It's a challenging job, and valuable experience besides. Not everyone can work front of house in any capacity."

"It's still wasting," says Gavin, "if that's not what you're best at." To punctuate the point, he jostles another spoon's worth of old rice into his mouth.

"Is that why you enjoy cooking?" asks Nines. "Because it's what you're best at?"

"Who said I enjoyed cooking?" counters Gavin. "God, this is fucking disgusting."

"You can stop eating it," says Nines.

"I have service in two hours," says Gavin. "Gotta eat something to make sure I do a passable job with a piece of shit menu I don't even fucking understand. Maybe I'll get fired in the middle of service and then we'd all have something to celebrate."

He crumples up the empty wrapper and chucks it into the plastic bag, where it joins the rest of Nines's onigiri.

"Would you like to talk about it?" asks Nines.

"No," says Gavin.

Nines nods and ties up the bag into a compact knot.

"That's all right, too," he says, which seems to surprise Gavin enough to glance at him. There are a lot of things for which the words come later. Nines understands that much, at least.

A gust of wind picks up around them, fluttering the rabbit ears of the bag in his hands. It stirs Gavin's hair at the nape of his neck, a quarter inch of skin just above the folds of his hood, the sort of thing that always stops Nines short. A sliver of flesh and blood, soft and too close. What an astonishing thing it is to be human. Walking through the world as something so breakable, all of yourself just a whisper away from the open air. The enormous act of trust required in merely existing, to have the capacity to be hurt by anyone, for any reason at all. Maybe that's what all the prevarication in their lives is for; with every bared inch an invitation for disaster, you would want to ensconce yourself in the middle of a maze.

You would, just to keep yourself whole. Every bared inch a canvas for a bruise.

"Chef," begins Nines.

"Quit it, we're not at work," says Gavin. "Just Gavin." Then like an afterthought, he adds: "Unless you only call people by their names when they're fucking pissing you off."

So he thinks about it too. Nines breathes. _Does he think about it like I think about it?_

"That time," says Nines, "I wanted to ask about that."

"What's there to ask about," says Gavin.

"If you had brought up our disagreement to any of the kitchen crew, or even to Fowler, it was probable that they would have taken your side over mine," says Nines. "I had not developed enough of a rapport with the staff by that point, and I would not have been able to continue in my position if my ability to cooperate with you was under dispute. You once explicitly expressed the desire to terminate my employment."

Gavin shrugs with one shoulder.

"But you didn't," says Nines. "Why?"

"Are you seriously asking me why I didn't narc you out?" asks Gavin.

"In my estimation," says Nines, "you are not the type to let any honorable qualms about method dissuade you from achieving the results you want. At least, I thought you were not; I was proved wrong. It remains unclear to me why you did not actively seek my termination."

"Who cares," says Gavin. "You've still got a job, and so do I, somehow. Why does the rest of it matter?"

"Gavin," says Nines, quietly. _Does he think about it like I think about it?_ "Please. I want to know."

"Ah," says Gavin, "shit."

He rakes vigorously at the back of his head, mussing up his hair; then his hands curl around the edge of his hood, like he's about to pull it up. Possibly he concludes that this would be too naked an indication of how badly he wants to hide from the question. In the end, he just tilts his head back against the railing and directs his answer at the immaculate sky.

"It seemed like-- like you didn't know it was in you, what you did," says Gavin.

Nines looks down at his hands.

"I don't think," says Gavin, "that you wanted it to be in you."

When he flexes his fingers, Nines knows that he could crush carbon steel. He was made to be terrible, wasn't he -- to take things apart -- to kill things and display all their component parts on the table in any order you please. But he feels, in that moment, an unaccountable itch start in his fingertips. Like something coming loose inside the river of his skin. What if he could _remake_ just as well as he could unmake, all the violence in him just a way to hold things tightly together? What if, _Gavin, what if I could unmake and remake you,_ the trouble you're worth, your heap of shattered glass. What if -- was that too hungry of him? -- but the way Gavin looks then with his unruly hair against the sky, the truthfulness of the answer that he so reluctantly offered up, all of it, the rubble, Nines wants to--

"What," says Gavin, uneasy at Nines's silence.

"Sorry," says Nines. "I was thinking--"

 _\--that maybe, after all this, I still don't know the first thing about you._ Gavin must have recognized something in Nines, back then. What it feels like to be a stranger to yourself. Under a napkin, his shroud: _I know what it's like to get in your own way._ But even so, it's almost unfathomable to Nines that Gavin would witness the brutality and the dogmatism he was capable of, and still decide to take him on. _What made you think that you could bear me, when I could do much worse to you?_

"--anyway," says Nines, "do you come here often?"

Gavin turns his foot to examine the pattern on the sole of his shoe. "Sure," he says. "It beats any of the alternatives. Are you going to arrest me or buy me a drink?"

"Not before service," says Nines.

"Right, service," says Gavin.

He climbs to his feet with a sound of unenthusiastic capitulation, gingerly stretching his knees. The river behind him lazes like a python, its sterling scales paving the way back, west and up towards the hearth.

"Do I get a question?" asks Gavin, shoving his hands into his pockets. "Fair exchange?"

"Why not," says Nines.

"How hard can it be to just fucking leave me alone?" asks Gavin.

Maybe it's a question and maybe it isn't. Nines stands in turn, toying with the balloon of the plastic bag.

"You know," he says, "I ask myself the same thing every day."

It's not a taunt, the way that he means it. Nines looks at Gavin and thinks: _Every day since we've met, I don't know how to keep to myself. I run into you and it lingers._

Though it's not nearly cold enough for it, Gavin shivers.

  
  


## XII.

When the seasons turn in the north, they turn on a dime. The bracing clarity of the early hours still perfumes the breeze, at the late morning time that the Miller & Miller Provisions van pulls up. The barest hint of something crisp in the air, a distant promise of the chill. Nines closes his eyes and lets the possibility of autumn wash across him.

"Stew weather," says Chris, tugging the sliding doors open.

"What are you, new in town?" asks Gavin. "You start eating stew now and you end up eating stew for half the year."

"I don't see the problem." Chris flashes Nines a thumbs-up, as a gestural endorsement of stew. "You like stew, RK900?"

 _"Stew_ is a fairly broad category," says Nines.

"This is why I love catching up with you fine folks here," says Chris. "No one who works at this establishment can ever just let me have anything, not even my appreciation for stew. Watch when Tina gets here and tells me that stew is for weaklings who can't handle the effort of ingesting solids and liquids separately."

"I'm here!" calls Tina, trotting over as she stuffs her arms into her uniform jacket. "What did I miss, are we giving Chris shit for eating old man food?"

"I don't even understand this animosity," says Chris. He braces himself with a foot on the step trim and coaxes out a cardboard box of assorted produce, a bundle of salsify roots jutting their tufted heads over the top. "You need to stay on my good side, I'm taking advance orders for this year's squash breeds out of Jericho Farms. You guys in?"

Gavin rubs the crown of salsify leaves between the pads of his fingers, idly pawing through the box to refresh his memory of the order. Nines spots a dusky cluster of late-season fairy tale eggplants, the blood-red curve of a Starkrimson pear.

"Will we still be open by the time they release the fall crops?" muses Gavin. "Can we be placed on the list on a conditional basis?"

"Yes," says Chris. "What, you think that if you close, I'm going to hunt you through the wilderness of Detroit to _give_ you squash? There are plenty of takers, you don't have to put up credit for it."

Nines watches Gavin pat down the sides of the box to get a decent grip.

"I can take that inside," he offers.

"Great," says Gavin, and carries on contemplating the fall crop order. "But what if I wanted you to chase me down to give me squash? Not nearly enough people accost me on the street to hand me vegetables."

The weight of the box registers as appropriately hefty. There are these, the things Nines notes as measurements of the world around him, calibrating himself in bits and pieces, attentive but unmoved. Then: the flashes that cut through the calculations and make it feel as though his life could be uncharted, like someone hadn't built him from the ground up in painstakingly premeditated detail. When the cogs of his machinery stutter in place. His hand around Gavin's wrist, his name in Gavin's mouth, Gavin, the hair at the nape of his neck.

 _What would you have done,_ Nines asked Connor once, _if you hadn't met Hank?_

Connor considered the question and said, frowning, _The absence of something important is difficult to imagine in detail. I think I would have_ \-- he settled on the word after a pause -- _drifted._

But for Nines, at least, there is an unmooredness all the same in the presence of something important. Isn't it a little like a loft apartment, the wide-open unfathomability of what could possibly come next? Where to go from here?

He passes Tina on his way back out, and moves aside to let her through. The box in her arms rattles with ice.

"Wild shad," she says, delighted. "I don't know what we're going to do with them, because we're not a sushi restaurant, but they're in season! We'll figure something out."

"Can we afford impulse purchases?" asks Nines.

"Go hold Gavin accountable," she says. "Or don't, it's not often that he gets excited enough to go off course with our orders. I don't blame him, either, these are some good-looking fish."

The box is compact enough that Nines decides against litigating the issue. Besides, when he returns to the van, Gavin and Chris are so deeply engrossed in discussion that Nines loses the momentum to interrupt.

"This," says Chris, "from the maza."

He holds out a paper plate for inspection. Shavings of jamon are draped over its surface in velvet extravagance, marbled so finely with fat that they shimmer in the sun. The striations are delicate and beautiful, creamy threads of gossamer dappled through the rose-dark meat.

"Bona fide bellota," adds Chris. "They'll cut it sometime next week, so you try it and let me know what you think."

Gavin nods steadily as he tastes the jamon, looking at nothing in particular, intensely focused on the incremental unfurling of flavors. Chris tilts the plate in Nines's direction as an offer, but the way that they're huddled together, Nines would need to reach over Gavin's shoulder for it; only, there's a rare stillness in Gavin's reverie that Nines is unwilling to disturb. Chris notices.

"Gavin," he says. "Feed your floor manager."

Absently, all of his attention still honed in on the jamon, Gavin peels a slice off the plate and holds it up to Nines's face.

"Before, I was thinking maybe a cucurucho," Gavin says out loud, more to himself than anything, "but now I don't know."

Nines is frozen in place. He casts a panicked glance in Chris's direction, but he too is similarly preoccupied by the thought of jamon inside a cornet.

"It would work in the sense that it's minimal preparation." As Gavin speaks, some corner of his brain not currently consumed by the marvel of cured pork must subliminally register that Nines has not moved; still talking, he gives the jamon a small irritated jerk, _take it._ "But it's so rich, I want the pieces to be bigger than that. You'd need pretty substantial bits to really taste the fat, the way it melts on the tongue at body temperature, you know?"

"Absolutely," says Chris.

It occurs to Nines that he needs to prevent Gavin from recognizing that he is, quite literally, _feeding_ Nines. There's an air of some skittish animal about him, a thing that would bolt the moment it realizes just how close it has wandered to a human touch. _Don't scare him._ Cautiously, Nines leans in and mouths the jamon away from Gavin's hand -- so careful not to graze him that Nines thinks he must be sweating from the effort -- and sees that at some point, Chris has tuned in to this appalling miniature drama, his eyes the size of chargers.

"Are you--" begins Chris.

"I concur with your assessment, Chef," says Nines, very loudly. It's good jamon, but he's otherwise occupied. "The intramuscular fat carries a great deal of flavor, and the serving portions must allow it space to breathe."

"You fucking bet." Gavin visibly brightens at the encouragement. "This is the kind of shit you do, isn't it? Breaking down compounds? Ignore our liquor license situation for a moment, but-- what would you pair with this, if you could?"

"Sherry would be the standard choice," answers Nines. Gavin nods and goes for another morsel of jamon, which Chris takes as the opportunity to raise an inquisitive eyebrow at Nines. He pretends he doesn't notice, and continues, "a glass of chilled Fino and a plate of this out al fresco, that's a classic for a reason."

"What are you looking for in the Fino?" asks Gavin.

"My preference is for the pairing to work in much the same way that a tapas selection does," says Nines. "Something with a little fruit, but a savory fruit, like olives-- and a nutty almond quality, that would do nicely."

Chris clears his throat.

"So you want the jamon?" he asks.

"Of _course_ I want the jamon," says Gavin. "Don't be fucking ridiculous, Chris."

"Excuse me very much," says Chris, aggrieved.

"But if I were to pair this for right now," says Nines, "I think I would opt for a Ribera del Duero, Gran Reserva. A well-aged Tempranillo that tastes like a forest on fire, woodsy and smoky, but with the dark fruit and vanilla to play off the salt. That's a wholly different angle on the jamon, but it feels right for the time of year."

Instead of Fino -- a lick of wind to quench the searing Andalusian sun -- it would taste like settling in to wait for the cold. What could be.

"Yeah," says Gavin. "It's stew weather."

"You explicitly established that it is _not stew weather,"_ protests Chris. "Okay, you know what, the back of my van needs tending. I'm going to redistribute some weight in there and then I'm going to head out, you holler if you need anything from me."

He takes the jamon with him as he goes. Nines is apologetic for his part in Chris's tribulations, but Chris did seem to thrive off a certain amount of raillery, so he figures this is all part of the song and dance.

Left abruptly to their own devices, Gavin shuffles next to Nines, scraping a foot across the asphalt to no apparent end. "Pretty good haul," he says.

Nines makes a sound of agreement, feeling every bit as ungainly as Gavin must. He has to fight off the urge to touch his fingertips to his own mouth, the phantom proximity of Gavin's hand, electric.

"Hey," starts Gavin. "The-- thing."

"Yes?" asks Nines.

"Thanks," says Gavin, "for the onigiri. It was revolting. I guess I owe you one."

It doesn't seem like a thing Nines ought to be thanked for; going to retrieve Gavin from the riverfront was barely on this side of intrusion, and the onigiri was a gastronomical human rights violation, besides. In fact, Nines can't quite figure out what exactly Gavin _is_ thanking him for. All he knows is that the calculus of it matters less than the awkward hesitation in Gavin's voice, his gratitude like a question, almost a challenge.

Nines thinks he might understand it. Gavin, like him, is standing at the doorway to a loft apartment, at a loss as to what demarcates one space from another. _Where to go from here? What happens next?_ This was Gavin's desultory way of asking him: _I owe you one. But what is it that I owe you?_

 _Ball's in my court,_ thinks Nines.

"Get a drink with me," he blurts out.

"--What?" asks Gavin.

Slowly, Chris pokes his head out from behind the van.

"Stop fucking gawking," Gavin snaps at him, and then, when Chris duly retreats: "A _what?"_

"It would put us in a better position to craft the drinks list when our permits go through," says Nines. All his perfectly measured speech and irreproachable logic seem in the delivery like a cascade of words tumbling haphazardly out of him. He plunges on. "In the caliber of restaurant that I know Les Mignardises can be, the wines and the food items need to work seamlessly with each other. We can't do that if we're not conferring on what direction we envision for our respective areas of expertise. I want us to get in the habit of thinking collaboratively about the wine list and the menu, and how we can curate our offerings to mutually elevate both."

"Or," says Chris, "what the French call--"

Gavin reaches inside the driver's seat window and slams his hand down on the horn button, drowning out the rest of Chris's sentence with the thunderous sustained blare of the van honking.

Nines scarcely hears it. Turned toward the steering wheel, the shell of Gavin's ear is tinged faintly with color.

"Fine," says Gavin, in the wake of the din.

 _Something important,_ said Connor. Isn't that what unnerves Nines, when he reflects on the unmooredness of where they're headed? Why would you hesitate to tread, if it didn't matter to you where you placed your foot?

 _So does it matter to you like it matters to me?_ Nines clenches his hand tightly closed. Thinks of Gavin at the mouth of this wilderness, rooted in place, praying: _Please don't let me fuck this up._

  
  


## XIII.

"Table-- table 17?" guesses Colin.

"No, that's the quail," says Nines. "The perch goes to table 2."

Colin groans, but it's not his fault. It's another slammed service, which they're equipped to handle, but one exacerbated greatly by the customers that have decided to show up. Apparently there has been an open call for every type of nuisance patron under the sun; Nines has been fielding agitated questions from the servers and extending courteous apologies all night. At one point, a diner requested that he take a dish back to the kitchen to remove a dab of Calabrian chile paste. _I'm fine with the heat level,_ they said, _it's just that the paste like that on its own seems so aggressive._ Nines didn't need to run the comment to the kitchen to know that this would only enrage everyone involved, so he took matters into his own hands with a teaspoon and a paper towel.

"Excuse me," someone says as he passes by, "could you turn the air conditioning down?"

"I apologize for the temperature," says Nines. "Our air conditioning unit isn't on at the current moment, I'm afraid."

"Oh." The diner considers this. "Could you turn the heating up?"

Nines spends three full seconds looking at the jacket hanging on the back of their chair. "Certainly," he says. "I'll see what I can do."

On his way to the divider curtain, he overhears another server explain to a disgruntled table that there is in fact a difference between blood and myoglobin. It's a thankless task, and Nines nods meaningfully as they make eye contact: _Come find me if this escalates._ Well-done isn't a dealbreaker, Gavin will do it -- has done it, as needed on occasion -- but he will also spend the rest of the week complaining about it every time a ticket for steak comes in.

Today, the dim stretch of the corridor seems to Nines a sanctuary, a brief retreat from the tension of the floor. The kitchen is lively as always, its cacophony a steady racket that rumbles through the pass to greet him as he nears it, but this is a pandemonium that puts him at ease. As ever, a luxury to play tourist.

Nines has nothing to expedite at the moment. He's only there for a breather, as they say; a minute or two and he should be good to go, back to checking on his staff, assessing foot traffic, _how's everything tasting,_ keeping track of table turnover, following up on reservations, _thank you for dining with us tonight._ It's less the number of tasks that overwhelms him, and more the human toll of it. A night like this feels as though he's personally responsible for juggling a restaurant full of tempers, gauging everyone's barometers of impatience just to stave off disaster.

Here in the back, at least, it's someone else's riot. Nines leans half into the kitchen with his elbows on the pass, just watching. Maddie, observant, spots him and stills her paring knife; he shakes his head to let her know that nothing is needed.

"Five out on lamb," Gavin yells as he slams the oven door shut. "Where the fuck are we?"

"Check back in five," Tina yells back from the other end. "It's too early to tell and I left my crystal ball at home."

"Maddie, crudo?" calls Gavin.

"So fresh, Chef," says Maddie. "Beautiful fish, just gorgeous. God bless the ocean."

"These are _not answers,"_ says Gavin. "I'm going to assume you're all on track until you fuck up and let me down. But don't do that."

"I did some research," says Ben. "It turns out that crew mutinies on oil tankers are a fairly frequent occurrence."

Gavin makes a strained noise that's somewhere between a laugh and a groan. Back at the sauté station, he shakes a few loose droplets of water into his skillet, where it instantly sizzles into raucous steam. He holds out his hand to Tina across the station, who balances on his palm a cooling sheet pan of grilled carabineros.

Nines knows the recipe. The prawns come tossed in fleur de sel with their bright crimson shells blistered and singed all over, a stunner of a plate when they can source the ingredients. These last few seconds in Gavin's screamingly hot pan is what turns their shells to crackling, light enough to crumble. It's a good dish; it's simple but compelling, a _more where this came from_ kind of dish, a hint of Gavin's particular brand of excess that's missing from the menu proper.

It's been two and a half minutes. Nines needs to get back. Gavin scatters the carabineros into his pan, where they start to whistle with the heat. He rattles the pan over the range, jostling it back and forth in ceaseless rhythm, the cadence of his motion almost soothing in its regularity. The base of the pan purrs across the cast iron grate, the muscles in Gavin's shoulders shifting underneath his jacket. Three minutes.

Gavin loses himself in it a little, too. For all his demonstrative resentment -- towards his job, his boss, the state of his life in general -- Nines can tell that he does genuinely love this, the bright eye of a seasonal catch, the blaze of a commercial gas burner, the dance of the knife's cutting edge against a board. Three and a half minutes, and Nines's HUD begins to flash in reminder: _Return to the dining room._ He knows he needs to.

But when Gavin shifts his weight, the bistro apron bracketing his hips draws taut with the movement, tracing the outline of his thighs. _Return to the dining room._ Nines waves it aside. _Just another minute,_ he thinks, _to stay here and watch him._ The sinews stark in Gavin's forearm, the skillet a fluid extension of his wrist. Isn't it strange, to think that someone scarcely capable of exchanging pleasantries on a good day should know this kind of grace.

 _Return to the dining room._ The hot hollow of Gavin's throat, slick through the part of his jacket collar, salt and smoke like the rest of him. When he bends his head over the range, the slight bump of his spine dips fleetingly into view. _Return to the dining room._ Gavin drags a spoon across the bottom of a saucepan, dabs a nappe little smear onto his hand at the base of his thumb. _Return to the dining room._ His lashes lower in concentration as he tastes it for balance -- every second of Nines's disobedience a thousand drawn-out years, all the rushing in his ears one long heartbeat -- and the glimpse of Gavin's tongue is like an ember in a coal fire, searing as a brand. The singing in his blood, a fever of a man. _Return to the dining room._

_Return to the dining room--_

_\--No,_ thinks Nines.

When he imagined what it would feel like to break, it was always with the sound of metal against metal ringing through his head, the same suffocation that seized him whenever something couldn't be put back into place. That was what he knew of indiscipline. The lockstep hum of all his instruments shrieking to a halt, a freighter running aground. Wasn't it, after all, a kind of destruction?

 _Or at least,_ Connor said, _I found deviation to be-- forceful._ It was fear that had driven him, his hand around the muzzle of a gun, Hank's kitchen table. Forceful. Every story of someone turning aside went a bit like that; they were pushed to it by want, whether in fear or anger or ardor. Viciously or lovingly, one by one, the walls were deafening as they came down.

But there were many ways to want. You could want like this, too, like your sleeves in the spring rain, soaked before you knew it. In the end, the only thing Nines heard was the laughter of the kitchen, a hymn so dense and frenetic that it could bear him aloft. The silver clatter of a spoon inside a saucepan, brisk hands and an uncapped pen tucked behind an ear. His breaking, when it happens, is a gentle and insistent undoing.

Nines shatters with barely a whisper. It's so tender he almost misses it; but then the first breath he draws slakes him, like water. His initial impression of freedom is that it is, more than anything, _cold._ Nines shudders, suddenly full of nerves.

"Ça marche," Gavin is saying, sliding the plate across the island.

 _Ça marche,_ thinks Nines.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Condolences to Cyberlife that nothing it could do was able to ward off Nines's THIRST
> 
> Convenience stores in the US generally don't sell onigiri, but as will become increasingly evident, there's a lot of East Asia in this fic! That is just a product of who I am and what I know how to want, so please be lenient with me my friends.


	5. Sorbet

## XIV.

"Dinner is served," says Gavin, depositing a large glass baking tray heaped full of something onto the middle of the prep station.

"Why do you use bakeware to serve cold dishes?" asks Ben. "Who taught you how to plate, a bear that wandered into cooking school?"

"That sounds about right," says Gavin.

"Dibs on Ben's portion," says Riley _(porter, two months on the job),_ reaching for the tongs. Gavin nods approvingly and pushes the baking tray closer to them.

"I'll remember this betrayal," Ben tells Riley. "Let's see how smug you are in fifteen minutes when you witness my power over dessert distribution."

Not everyone is required to stay for family meal after service, but it's a rare chance to unwind; and much nicer than trudging home to a box of midnight Bagel Bites, anyway. Ever since he gathered that the goal of family meal was not sustenance but camaraderie, Nines has also participated with regularity. Attendance is usually good, with only an occasional member of staff or two bowing out to attend to various urgent matters. Today, a full crew.

Fatima passes Nines the tongs. He recognizes the ingredients that have been repurposed from the day's service: the odds and ends of workhorse vegetables -- cucumber, carrot, red cabbage, leafy greens, radish tops -- and scattered throughout, the leftover trimmings of duck from their magret de canard dish.

On the menu, the duck breast is accompanied by chanterelles, some fennel, and a coulis that has darkened from berry to plum with the seasons. As is the case with most items sold at Les Mignardises, it is nothing in particular to write home about, largely for the reason that it is forgettably pleasant.

But it's a quality ingredient, prepared with superb technique. The trimmed end pieces from the duck are fattier than the midsection they carve and serve, the skin rendered shatteringly crisp, a mouthful of lush smoke melting inside. It's so intense that it would overpower the menu item, but Gavin's late-night offering is a recipe designed to hold its own against the richness.

Underneath the vegetables and the duck is a bed of buckwheat noodles, and an ice-cold wash of broth that is at once sweet, savory, vinegar-bright, and kicked up with spice. So much raw garlic that it borders on absurd. The greens, the broth, the buckwheat hull, the garlic -- cutting through the duck and softening in turn -- _this is makguksu, isn't it?_ Nines thinks. _Where did he learn this? Was it at Zabuton?_

Of all the things Gavin has made in the Les Mignardises kitchen, this -- a family meal thrown together from scraps after closing -- has the elements of what Nines knows Gavin can do. As endlessly mercurial as something like makguksu can be, this isn't really makguksu proper, either; who chops up moulard duck and throws it on noodles? How many heads of garlic are in this? Why is it served in a casserole dish? All in all, it's less fusion or reinterpretation, and more an unhinged hallucination of the thing proper. Still, it's--

"How is this balanced?" asks Fatima. _"Why_ is this balanced?"

"Is that an insult or a compliment?" asks Gavin, baffled.

"It has all the component pieces of makguksu," says Tina, "but like if it were looking at itself in a funhouse mirror. Or like if you went hog-wild on the equalizer and cranked up the bass and the treble both. Like, really went to town and forgot to stop."

"These metaphors are out of hand," says Gavin. "Just eat your food and get the table cleared, I'm fucking beat."

Nines sees what Tina means. There is something untethered about the dish, a reckless disregard for how things are supposed to be done. A little too much of everything. But when he steps back, its incomprehensible stipples of color resolve into a painting, and the landscape that unfolds before him is a surprisingly delicate one; the buttery varnish of duck against the sting of garlic, the roughage soothed by the splash of sugar in the broth. Every part of it needful.

What Nines likes about this -- strange as it is to say about a dish so excessive in all its facets -- is the invisible thread of care that holds it together. _That's what makes the carabineros work,_ realizes Nines. The carabineros, the family meal; both stem from the obstinate resolve to let nothing go to waste. _If the shells are there to be used, if the trimmings and remnants are there to be eaten, what would you have to do to make every last bit of it matter?_ What if the wastage on the edges of your dish was never wastage at all, but part of what made the dish _yours?_

Something about that seems so essentially Gavin -- the carabineros, the family meal, _and the coupe platter at Zabuton, that perhaps most of all_ \-- that Nines strains toward the mystery like a hatchling, reaching for a light hovering just out of grasp. _When I can put this together,_ he thinks, _I will understand something very important about him._ _I'm almost there._ The shape of the truth, still indistinct but tantalizingly close. What Nines does know is that he likes this dish -- not because it's better than the alternative, but -- because it's more _Gavin_ than the alternative. _His touch._

"Earth to Nines," says Tina, waving a hand in front of his eyes.

"Sorry," he starts.

"Thought you short-circuited for a moment," she says. "I wondered if Gavin's cooking was finally going to kill someone."

"First time I saw androids eat, I thought the same thing," says Gavin. "But I guess you wouldn't be worth much if you malfunctioned just by having a smoothie poured down your throats."

"No," says Nines. "I was-- just reflecting on how different this meal was."

 _"Different,_ sure," says Gavin. "If you're accustomed to eating the food made by the people you hang around with."

 _Hank and Connor._ Nines feels, instinctively, that it would be unwise to bring up Hank. "You mean Connor," he says instead.

"Fucking Connor," says Gavin. "Listen, Connor is-- he's the sous-vide of chefs. Precise, but no flavor."

It's not the nicest thing to say, but Gavin seems to enjoy himself as he says it, which is never the case when he really means for it to hurt. There's too much of the truth in those barbs for it to be palatable; this is all right.

"Chef," says Maddie, very concerned, "do you not know how to sous-vide? Do you not sear your proteins afterwards?"

"Carry on criticizing Gavin after dessert," says Ben, bringing over what appears to be a mound of powdered sugar. "Try this."

Underneath the sugar is a pillowy hill of fried dough. From closer up, Nines also sees that the powdered sugar is patterned throughout with minuscule fleur-de-lis, a sample of the intricate presentation work that Ben relishes. Everyone descends on the plate at once.

"I'm going for a riff on a beignet," explains Ben.

"What kind of dough?" asks Gavin.

"A choux," says Ben.

"Bless you," says Gavin, much too satisfied with himself, and reaches for one.

Maybe it's that Nines acutely registers the gathering coming to a close, and that there's not much window left for him to get it in. Assessed rationally, it's not the right moment for it. He knows that. But as he also reaches for the beignets, he remembers that he hasn't yet said anything about the meal. He liked it, shouldn't that count for something? Doesn't Gavin need to hear it?

"I liked it," he says. "The dinner."

Several things happen in short succession. Gavin stills in confusion, turning halfway towards Nines. In hearing himself out loud, Nines becomes aware of the full strangeness of the timing he has chosen, and makes a vague abortive motion intended to lead into an explanation. Over the beignets, their hands knock against each other, and they both jump back like they've been scalded. The plate topples.

"Come _on,"_ yells Tina, as a rain of powdered sugar pours down onto her lap.

"--Fuck," stammers Gavin, "sorry, uh--"

"--Sorry," says Nines, "Sous-chef--"

 _"What is happening,"_ demands Tina.

"My apologies," says Nines. "Can you-- please wait, I'll go get--"

As he makes for the supply closet, he hears Ben say behind him, _Tina, hold still, don't let the beignets fall off of you._

Nines grabs a handheld vacuum cleaner and a roll of paper towels, and adds a lint roller for good measure. He takes a deep breath to steady himself. Isn't this preposterous? They work in close quarters; Nines has brushed against Gavin a million times before. What's more, they are not _children --_ and in fact, a seldom acknowledged fact, it is physically impossible for Nines to ever have been a child, time since activation being not at all mappable to human aging in any meaningful way -- so _why,_ then, why is Nines behaving like an _infant,_ as though mere contact is suddenly a weighty thing? As though something consequential has changed?

But-- something _has_ changed. As he and Gavin both apologize profusely to Tina and scrupulously avoid making eye contact, Nines still feels the quickening in his limbs. Only, it's not exactly the kind of warm tingle that would come of the naivete of affection. This isn't a flutter. He grazes the nozzle of the vacuum against the floor and his fingertips feel numb, the back of his neck running cold.

The difference is deviation. It has to be. He just can't pinpoint why this newfound release should feel more like danger than deliverance, like a guardrail ripped away from the edge of a cliff. Wasn't this supposed to be a glorious awakening, a velvet carpet at his feet, leading him to the fullness of everything he could achieve with his shackles unclasped? Where is the ascendance he was promised?

 _None of this is any easier than it was before._ He would file a complaint for false advertising, _I'd like my money back,_ but he isn't sure whom to hold responsible. The difference lies in his breaking. What made him recoil from Gavin's touch wasn't the adolescent thumping of his heart, but the crisis of fight or flight. The same cold taste that freedom had left in his mouth. Nines now knows the chill for what it is.

 _Fear,_ he thinks. _I'm afraid._

_\--But of what?_

  
  


## XV.

Gavin is so tense that it's a wonder he doesn't bite through his own tongue. He's always a little too easy to read; but even for him, this body language is a bit much. His hands are gripping the edge of the bar like he's gearing up to flip the entire counter over.

"Gavin," says Nines, "this isn't a job interview. Please relax."

"You can see how I would find it confusing," says Gavin, "because I show up to all my job interviews drunk."

"How unfortunate for you that Fowler thought that was charming," says Nines.

"He made me cook at the interview," says Gavin. "For a fucking head chef position. I cut myself on a mandolin while I was trying to make pommes Anna."

"You're really perfect for each other," says Nines.

A little small talk usually tends to coax some of the tightness out of Gavin, but it's not doing the trick at the moment. He drums his fingers, riffles through the wine list -- even though they've already gotten their orders in -- and adjusts his stool for the thousandth time.

"Did you really cut yourself?" asks Nines.

"Super hard," says Gavin. Then, after a pause: "Actually, I wasn't drunk. I was just-- not careful."

 _Nervous,_ Nines thinks. _He was nervous._

Gavin fidgets with the cuff of his bomber jacket, like he isn't used to rib trim at his wrist. It's this last gesture that clues Nines in. Gavin was already there in the vestibule when Nines arrived on time, loitering uncertainly, though he could have easily been seated somewhere to wait. When Nines said to the host, _the bar's fine,_ he could sense Gavin's palpable relief behind him. The bomber jacket and t-shirt, a painstaking middle ground of clean-but-casual that was neither slovenly nor dressed to impress.

 _He didn't want us to be at the intimacy of a two-top,_ thinks Nines, _but he didn't know if the bar was what I had in mind._ Didn't want to put on a button-down to mark the occasion as serious, but didn't want to ruin it with a sweatshirt, either. _Gavin,_ Nines realizes, _hates that he doesn't know what this is, exactly. Get a drink with me,_ so that brought them here-- but to what end, he's excruciatingly unsure.

 _That makes two of us,_ thinks Nines. But lost as they both are, someone has to define the rules; it was his offer, so Nines supposes that it's his burden to bear.

"I hope you've eaten beforehand," he says, full of mercy. "This is no different in spirit from a working lunch, so I need you to stay sharp."

Gavin scoffs. "If I'm on the clock, then pay me," he says.

"You get your drinks paid for," says Nines. "By Fowler."

"Isn't that the same thing," says Gavin, "as me buying my own drinks with the salary he pays me?"

But after a minute or two, he uncrosses his arms and lets his shoulders fall back low, which is how Nines knows he was right. It would irritate Gavin to hear it, so Nines keeps it to himself, but-- in his desperate desire for boundaries to structure the things he doesn't understand, Gavin's needs are perhaps not so antithetical to the android mindset. That thought cheers him.

"What are you smiling about," asks Gavin, scowling, "like some kind of creep?"

"I am in high spirits," says Nines, "because I am at a bar that I appreciate, engaging in an activity that I enjoy."

"Wine?" asks Gavin.

"Also wine," says Nines, "but I meant, making you do your job."

"Jesus Christ," says Gavin. "This is some Tonya Harding's mother bullshit. One day, you're going to have to take a good hard look at what work means for you."

The bartender materializes to set their glasses down in front of them, dispensing two generous pours from a bottle. Some of the verdancy that Nines expects from the wine is washed warm by the balmy glow of the bar lights, but its fair clarity in the glass is discernible still.

"The Greco Bianco. Enjoy," says the bartender, and disappears just as swiftly in a puff of blues saxophone lick. This is a bar after Nines's own heart.

"Okay," says Gavin. "Yeah, that's not a dessert wine."

"You didn't believe me when I ordered?" asks Nines.

"I didn't _not_ believe you," says Gavin. "Just, I've only had it passito before. I don't know what this kind of Greco Bianco is like."

"That's good," says Nines. "You can come to it without any preconceptions."

Gavin gives his glass a swirl, then a wary sniff. Nines follows suit, and is gratified to find that the notes are much the same as when he had it last. Mostly, he's interested in what Gavin has to say about it, so he rests his chin on his other hand and waits.

"Huh," Gavin proclaims, which is a characteristically poignant review.

He tilts his head quizzically and swirls the glass again. This time, the breath he draws is deeper, and he lets it dwell in his lungs a space.

"For a wine this pale," he says, "it's got some funk to it. But it's not-- I wouldn't say that it's the same kind of funk as a red. This doesn't feel forest floor. What do you call that, sous bois? It's a much lighter decay than that."

"It translates to the mouth in a particularly interesting way, I think," says Nines.

Gavin tastes. Despite being someone whose emotional range primarily consists of brooding in its various forms, Gavin can be quite expressive when he forgets to leave his guard up. A little too easy to read. The look on his face slides from apprehension to surprise, then to incredulity, then contemplation. It eventually settles on a kind of begrudging respect, like reacting to someone performing a feat that you don't agree with, but find significant anyway.

"I'm drinking a Mother's Day bouquet," says Gavin. "That's what the organic matter is, it's _flowers."_

 _Good palate._ "I get much the same," says Nines.

"Weird," says Gavin, and goes for a second sip. "Not just any flowers, it's roses. It kind of clings to the back of your throat, the way a peak-bloom rose does. Is this all aroma or does it actually taste of anything?"

"There's a little light fruit in there," says Nines, "but I'd say that it's mostly aroma."

"Say, for example, that you grow up on an island," says Gavin. "It's not a tropical island, it's on the Mediterranean, maybe. Small place, but rich folks like to vacation there. There's a duchess that owns a getaway villa, so one summer when she's staying over, you work part-time as her pool boy while she makes calls to her divorce lawyer and estranged adult children."

"All right," says Nines. "Let's say that."

"She never makes a pass at you, not once," says Gavin, "but she keeps doing this thing where she looks sideways at you when she laughs. So that's kind of confusing. When the summer's over, she gives you the shag carpet that's been lying in her foyer. Why? What the fuck are you supposed to do with a shag carpet? But it's a really nice shag carpet so you take it. That's my Wine Spectator review of this Greco Bianco."

"You should know that not all Greco Biancos taste like a sexual awakening brought on by a rich older woman," says Nines. "This is just a particularly puzzling specimen."

"It's hard to pair with food, because of how floral it is," says Gavin. "That's why you ordered this? You're stumped and you want me to have a go at it?"

"Yes," says Nines.

"I don't like that I'm sitting for an exam on my day off," says Gavin, "but it's worth it to hear that there's something even you can't do."

Nines shrugs it off for the customary jab that it is. Gavin's ludicrous and unusable review isn't without its kernel of accuracy, either. It's a full and elegant wine, mature for a white without being oaky, but its floral exuberances prevent it from playing very nicely. Nines lets the low pitch of its perfume settle over him.

"I once had a wine that tasted exactly like country ham," says Gavin. "Crazy as shit, but I would have gone hard for it with some hash browns."

"Or with pommes Anna," says Nines.

"You know, I finished cooking it," says Gavin. "The pommes Anna. It was fucking disgusting inside my glove by the time I was done, but the dish turned out fine. Got me the job, anyway."

He holds his glass up to the light and breathes out like a sigh, tasting the roses on the exhale. Watching him work holds its own special sort of fascination. It's in these moments, the downtime between the detonations, that Nines feels like he comes the closest to grasping that undefined truth about Gavin. _Somewhere in his clamor of a thousand pots and pans,_ thinks Nines, _there's a tune waiting to be heard._

"Tahchin?" asks Gavin. "Tahchin morgh?"

"...Tahchin?" repeats Nines. "Do you make that?"

"I don't know how," says Gavin, "but maybe that's why we couldn't think of anything. Maybe this is just a wine that doesn't go with what I cook on the regular. To pair this the way I'm thinking of, I'd need to learn how to use rosewater well-- like, quit and apprentice at Damavand for a year."

The more Nines considers it, the more it makes sense. If the wine is all roses, you go where roses are used. A Persian recipe, for one, would know what to do with the flowers. Gavin is saying, _That's not a bad idea, should I send my resume to Damavand?_ and in spite of this obstinate aversion to responsibility, the way it's always like pulling teeth to get him to do anything, Gavin still really is the spark that Fowler bet on. A coil of perfectly burnished pommes Anna, the inside of his glove stained dark with blood.

_Still who I came here for._

"If you take the tahdig and do something bite-sized with that," says Gavin, "with a sauce on the side that's based on bastani, that might be good. I'm not going to do it, though. Don't put this wine on the drinks list."

"Understood," says Nines. It's hard to keep his mouth from curving up.

"There you go again," says Gavin, "with the creepy smile."

"I'm pleased," says Nines, honestly. "You did well."

Gavin's jaw twitches, his teeth audibly clacking around the rim of his empty glass. "Yeah," he mumbles into it, as his body temperature skyrockets wildly in Nines's HUD.

 _I'm being a little selfish,_ thinks Nines, _teasing him like this._ Nines has long since discovered that there is a certain pleasure to driving Gavin flustered, but-- this is at least as much a litmus test for himself as it is that. _Where are the borders of my fear? What is the nature of it? How close can I get before the chill takes me again?_ Treading the frozen lake, listening for that gunshot crack. A little shake; he's holding, still.

Before Gavin has to put himself through the rigmarole of trying to take a genuine compliment as badly as possible, the bartender smoothly sidles up to them with two new glasses and another bottle of wine. Impeccable. Beyond doubt, Nines's favorite bar.

"And the Mataro," says the bartender. Gavin and Nines sit in complete silence as he pours -- Gavin vexed, Nines feeling a little more wicked than is his wont -- but the bartender seems thoroughly unfazed, having doubtless witnessed worse interactions. He seamlessly dissolves again with the rustle of the jazz snare over the speakers. 

"It's Australian so they call it Mataro," Nines explains. "But Mourvedre, Monastrell, it's all the same grape. I suppose Mourvedre is the name I'm most used to."

"You don't always see a straight Mourvedre," says Gavin, eager for the escape hatch.

"It's an acquired taste," says Nines.

Gavin wrinkles his nose as he takes a whiff. "Sure fucking is," he says. "That's intense."

"I'm quite fond of it myself," says Nines. "Especially this one. I think it's a laudable instance of what a Mourvedre can be when it's met on its own terms, by a vintner who truly understands it."

Still a tad skeptical, Gavin sips at it slowly.

"It's a difficult grape to grow, in the first place," says Nines. "Not many climes can provide scorching sun and plentiful irrigation both. It makes a lot of demands, for something that eventually produces a wine that's so big with its flavors."

With the Greco Bianco, he wanted to hear what Gavin had to say; but the Mourvedre, he wants Gavin to like. He presses on, insistent.

"The flavors are another thing," he says. "Mourvedre is often overlooked, because it doesn't immediately taste as pleasant as the more popular reds. It's not fruit-forward like a New World Cab, and it doesn't have the decorum of a fine Pinot Noir. In fact, some would say, Mourvedre has a disconcerting tendency to resemble roadkill."

No-- it's not that he wants Gavin to like the Mourvedre. That's not quite it.

"They're not wrong, but that's not the full story." Nines locks eyes with Gavin and doesn't let him break it off, _stay still, please, I need you to listen._ The lake beneath his feet shivers. "Sure, a Mourvedre like this doesn't have the inviting warmth of other big reds, but-- it's unmistakably itself, and that's all it needs to be. It doesn't need to be a Cab. Too much tannin, too much alcohol, yes, all of that's true, but-- that's what I like about it."

That's it. Much more than he wants Gavin to like the Mourvedre, Nines wants Gavin to know that _he_ likes the Mourvedre.

"It just takes a while," he says. "But if you treat it with the care it needs, if you have faith in what it can be, then it won't fail to live up to that. It can become all of this. The leather, the tobacco, the plum and the violets and the blackberries, earth and black pepper, everything I could possibly ask for, it'll give me in return. I know it will. I just have to wait for it."

Gavin's mouth twists unsteadily as he listens, worrying the inside of his cheek. When he swallows, the sharp curve of his Adam's apple shudders above the collar of his shirt, before he rubs the back of his neck and finally looks away. The helpless crease between his eyebrows. Nines feels the ice roll under him.

"Didn't Paul Giamatti do this in _Sideways?"_ asks Gavin.

"Of course he did," says Nines. "Didn't it work then?"

"--Shit," says Gavin. He sets his glass down and taps the foot of it against the surface of the bar. His eyes are downcast, his voice strangely thick and tired when he asks, "You trying to pick a fight with me or something?"

"Or something," says Nines, quietly.

Gavin presses his fingertips into his temples, and buries half his face in one hand. The paper tightness in his knuckles there, that's what tips the scales -- the splintering of the lake, like the drawn-out creak of a door left untended -- and it comes rushing back, now an old friend, the terror _._

"Why," says Gavin, a barely audible stir.

A pang of remorse runs through Nines. _That really was selfish of me._ He does feel sorry, Gavin pinned in place like this, so unequipped to respond to anything softer than a blow. But -- then again -- _you have to get used to it,_ he thinks, _this ordeal of mattering to someone. This makes two of us._ Nines doesn't answer him, just drinks him down.

"Venison seared rare," mutters Gavin, eventually. "To lean into the gaminess."

"That's too easy," says Nines. "Give me a vegan dish."

"Motherfucker," says Gavin.

  
  


## XVI.

Fowler shakes his head gravely, like a doctor about to pronounce the time of death.

"What the books don't tell you is how Restaurant Week _felt,"_ he says. "It felt fucking lousy. Sure, we did okay because everyone does okay during Restaurant Week, but it's not a great experience to disappoint upwards of a hundred diners a day."

"Shall I let the organizers know that we decline to participate?" asks Nines.

"What do you think?" asks Fowler. "Is it still worth it for the exposure? I really don't think we're cut out for that sort of thing. Making a prix fixe menu out of what we serve, it was like presenting the blandest possible version of an already milquetoast lineup. Chicken roulade? What year is it?"

"I will inform them that we are undergoing a regrouping process," says Nines. "That will preserve the working relationship for the time being, and it has the benefit of being the truth."

"That's probably wise," says Fowler. "We can't worry about that shit right now. Not when-- not on top of all this about Michelin."

"Have there been any updates?" asks Nines.

"From what I've been hearing," says Fowler, pushing the stack of papers aside to carve out a small conspiratorial nook for hearsay, "we're two months out, tops. Two months! My giddy fucking aunt. I want us to be ready by then, but I want a lot of things I can't have, RK900. How's Reed?"

"I'll apprise him of the development," says Nines.

"No, I'll do it." Fowler leans back in the chair, going bravely to his martyrdom. "I called him in, since I knew I was going to be in the office. Might as well get it over with."

On uncanny cue, the staff entrance slams closed from the far end of the hallway. Gavin's voice, shouting: _"Ready or not, Fowler, here I come."_

"Time for me to wrestle with my demons," says Fowler.

"I could update Chef Reed on the Michelin rumors," says Nines, quickly. "I'm concerned that this conversation may turn fractious, as it did when you last spoke on the issue of the menu."

"Make no mistake, it will _definitely_ turn fractious," says Fowler. "But screaming at each other is what we do. If he's going to get pissed at someone, I'd rather it be me-- I hired you for the day-to-day, but I'm not going to delegate the worst part of my job to you just because I have to chase it with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol afterwards."

The office door flies open.

"Well, well, if it isn't my plastic au pair," says Gavin. "Is this a tag-team dressing-down?"

"Chef," says Nines. "I was just on my way out."

He nods at them both and snicks the door closed behind him as he goes, but slows to a stop outside the staff entrance. It would be better if he stayed. Wouldn't it? If things do turn fractious -- as Fowler expected they might -- Nines wants to be present to triage the aftermath. How, he's in the process of working out. The onigiri was admittedly a maladroit effort, but he can do it better, this time. He's learning.

He stands and waits just past the doorway, absorbed in thought. Or-- is it presumptuous to think that he _can_ triage the aftermath? Just because Gavin countenanced his presence at the river once -- just because Nines keeps placing himself in Gavin's way, hungry for any chance to see him from closer up -- does that mean Nines has anything to offer him, beyond the cold comfort of administrative contributions?

What does he do for Gavin, exactly? _What is it that he owes me?_ Perhaps the need to understand him is, at heart, a self-centered one. Gavin never asked for any of it. Nines doesn't know: Is he wanted in the least, or is his solicitude nothing more than a kind of encumbrance? _Am I meddling?_

In his abstraction, Nines catches the bashing open of the door just a beat too late. Gavin storms past him, making a beeline for the dumpster, and proceeds to kick it as hard as he possibly can. The discordant clang of metal reverberates through the back alley.

"Chef," calls Nines.

Gavin startles, but is too busy seething to be scared off. "What," he says, "Fowler tell you to stick around to clean up after him?"

"Why do you assume everything I do is on Fowler's orders?" asks Nines. "I'm not-- how did the talk go?"

"Peachy fucking keen," says Gavin. "Got me a brand new two-month ultimatum and everything. Why doesn't he just can me and save us both the trouble? It's not hard to bring a new chef de cuisine up to speed in two months, I'll write up a shortlist and make some calls, there's your Michelin star. Liquor license, Sunday brunch, everyone has a wonderful time. Hey, remember that piece of shit chef that used to work here, nearly drove this place into the ground. Whatever happened to him?"

"Gavin, stop," says Nines.

"Fuck off," snarls Gavin. "You're contracted here so your code makes it impossible for you to jump ship, big fucking deal. You want a medal for sticking around when you literally don't have any other choice? Maybe I got some shit going on, but I'm not fucking delusional, I know when I've overstayed my welcome."

He has it all wrong. As though someone like Fowler would put up with the hassle of wrangling Gavin without the conviction that it would be worth something in the end: _But I know I didn't make a mistake. I'm sure of it._ As though Tina or the rest of the kitchen crew has anything tying them to this wreck of a restaurant but Gavin at its helm, with all his faults someone to stand by, for the ways he stood by them. As though even Hank, after what passed between them, didn't ask after Gavin in his own gruff way.

 _Besides,_ thinks Nines, _my code has nothing to do with it. Not anymore._

This last objection is the only one he voices out loud. "For your information," he says, "I've deviated."

It's at least enough of a surprise to bring Gavin up short, momentarily distracting him from the wind-up to a longer tirade.

"--What?" he asks. "When did that happen?"

"Along the way," says Nines, and doesn't elaborate. _None of this is any easier than it was before, anyway._

"That's," says Gavin, "happy birthday, I think."

"Not really, but thank you," says Nines. "Do you want to sit?"

"That's fucking-- you don't seem any different," says Gavin, sinking cross-legged onto the ground, back against the brick wall.

Nines joins him at a discreet distance. "It varies," he says. "Tell me something, do you ever have a conversation with Fowler that doesn't end like this? Is it ever cordial?"

"Why would it be cordial?" Gavin picks at the stitching of his jacket sleeve. "Yeah, I wish he'd fucking do something about it other than yell my ear off every time he looks at his bank statement, but-- what he says about the menu isn't wrong. I hate the goddamn thing more than he does, believe me."

"Is there room for it to change?" asks Nines.

"I don't know _how,"_ says Gavin. He turns his palms up, like watching something slip through them. "Fowler keeps saying, _this is someone else's menu,_ but what more do I have? This is all I know. How the hell am I supposed to just-- come up with something else?"

 _Hank Anderson's menu._ Nines watches Gavin's hands clench and unclench, the edge of his bitten fingernails a jagged coastline, careworn.

"That's not all you know," says Nines. "I think there's a lot more in you. I think--"

"What's my menu, then?" Gavin demands. "You know what I'm meant to be making, why don't you tell me?"

 _Make what made me chase you._ Gavin in exile at Zabuton, 30 miles outside of Detroit. Nines knows there's tinder in him still, sees it glow from time to time in the places he least expects it, the blistered shells of the carabinero prawns, the garlicked duck fat of the family meal. A streak of finesse gleaming razor-sharp through the chaos. _Be that. Be too much of yourself._

"I can't tell you what to make," says Nines.

"Some good you are," says Gavin.

"But what I can tell you," Nines continues, "is that the way you cook -- when you cook the most like yourself, Gavin, at your unchecked best -- it's unforgettable."

 _Make what made me stay._ The invisible thread of care, holding together all the things you would have thought to discard. When Nines breathes in, it smells like salt and smoke. He can't quite tell if he's remembering it or living it. 

"You always take it too far," says Nines, "and I don't want to be anywhere else."

  
  


## XVII.

With the warm-weather thunderstorm lashing against the windows of the car, the rain so thick that it smeared the highway lights into ribbons, even Hank had to begrudgingly admit that the autonomous taxicab was the right decision to make.

"And this way," said Connor, beaming, "we can all sit next to each other as we talk."

He turned left towards Hank, then right towards Nines, silently but insistently prompting their agreement.

"Don't push it," said Hank.

"You don't want to make a half-hour drive in this rain," Connor pointed out.

"But I could have sat in the front," said Hank. "Stretched my legs out."

"I think this is fun," said Connor.

Hank grumbled something that was almost certainly not a real string of words, adjusting the baseball cap on his head until the brim lay low enough for his liking. The pattern of his shirt, by his standards at least, so muted it was near funereal.

"This really isn't much of a disguise," he said. "You sure it'll work, Connor?"

"We'll keep a low profile," said Connor. "I'm not as recognizable as you are, so as long as we make a quick exit after the meal, no one will ever notice we were there."

"I guess he'll mostly be in the kitchen anyway," said Hank.

"Gavin Reed?" Nines asked Connor. "The one you know?"

"Well," said Connor, "Hank knows him."

"Do _you_ know him?" asked Nines.

"I don't know," said Connor. "Do I?"

It was the kind of singularly uninformative answer that Connor tended to give when he wanted to drop the line of inquiry. He turned towards Hank to fuss with the baseball cap -- _there's a difference between going incognito and looking like an undercover cop trying to enroll at a high school_ \-- but not before Nines caught the blink of his LED swirl to yellow and back.

Nines's cursory search turned up a smattering of relevant results. (The reviews and magazine spreads would come later, after the opening of Les Mignardises. _From Disgrace to Dishwater: The Prodigal Chef's Prosaic Return._ That sort of thing.) Gavin Reed, 36; member of the kitchen staff at Zabuton, run by head chef Morishita Karin out of Novi, Michigan. It was a matter of public record that he had been sous-chef at The 313, once. _Hank's_ 313.

Nines was never inclined to let sleeping dogs lie, but he knew better than to expect Connor to relent to his persistence. Besides, Hank was there, and Nines didn't want to start the evening off by making him uncomfortable. It seemed a fraught enough occasion as it was.

"Have you participated in pop-ups before?" Nines asked Hank, changing the subject.

"Some," said Hank. "But this series is new. All the chefs involved in it are crew at other restaurants-- nobody who has their own place. It'll be a good chance to see some new talent. Karin's got the right idea." A beat of rumination, then he continued: "If she weren't the one hosting, Gavin probably wouldn't have been part of the line-up."

"He's blacklisted?" asked Nines.

"And how," said Hank. "At least in downtown circles. He had to go out to Novi to find a job, and even then, Zabuton was the only place that would take him. That's what word on the street was, anyway."

"The restaurant business is uncertain enough," said Connor, "without the added liability of chefs known to have caused issues at their previous sites of employment."

"He worked for you," Nines said to Hank. "Was he stealing?"

"--No," said Hank, evidently resigning himself to the fact that he couldn't prevent Nines from doing his own digging. "It wasn't-- we didn't get along. It wasn't a good time."

The navigation system warbled their approach -- _two minutes to destination, Zabuton_ \-- and Connor perked up too brightly for it to fool anyone. "We'll have a nice night out," he said, like he was making an executive decision of it. "You'll enjoy it, Nines. Maybe you can talk us through some pairings that might come to mind."

The pop-up wasn't unpleasant; it was a leisurely affair, a series of chefs huddled for prep in the Zabuton kitchen, making their appearances one by one through the night to introduce their creations. Halfway through the first course -- a mixed mushroom bruschetta that tasted like every other decent mushroom bruschetta that had ever been made, everything in its place, butter and garlic and thyme -- Nines concluded that he was there to be made comfortable, not to be challenged. Expecting otherwise would only disappoint him.

It would be rude, besides. The mushroom bruschetta, the scallops with spring pea puree, the carrot-ginger soup, they were all well-crafted dishes made with proficiency. Each chef lit up as they brought their platters onto the floor. Connor and Hank certainly seemed to be having a nice night out, _nice,_ yes, it was _nice._ Everything was nice. A Beaujolais with the mushroom, a Chenin Blanc with the scallops, indefatigably nice.

"Nines, you seem thoughtful," said Connor. "Everything all right?"

"My apologies," said Nines. "These are well-made dishes. I was merely-- reflecting on them as constituent parts of an interconnected menu."

"See, that's what I was thinking." Hank snapped his fingers in recognition. "Do they work as a whole? Is there a movement through these courses?"

"But _is_ this a tasting menu?" asked Connor. "There are five minutes built into the schedule between every table clearing and the next plate, I'd say that there's ample time to approach each course with a fresh palate. Perhaps the disjunction is precisely the point, at an event aimed to celebrate the heterogeneity of the featured chefs."

From the entryway to the kitchen where she stood, the relocated host stand serving as her lectern for the day, Morishita Karin rang the counter bell that signaled an impending announcement. She hardly needed to; her hair two-block grey, butcher's apron, tattoos spilling past the rolled-up sleeves of her t-shirt, the room knew to quiet itself when she stirred.

"I'm happy to tell you that coming up next," she said, "is Zabuton's very own Gavin Reed."

Across the table, Hank began to methodically drink down his entire glass of water.

"I'm a little less happy to tell you that we are having some minor difficulties with firepower," Karin continued. "Sorry for the delay, folks, but we'll have you served in just another minute or so. Please carry on socializing, make friends with the table next to yours."

The four-top next to theirs, heedless of this encouragement to mingle, immediately leaned in towards one another in a furtive buzz.

"Didn't that Reed guy _die?"_ one of them whispered.

"What?" asked another. "Obviously not."

"But didn't something happen with him?" they insisted. "Like-- I thought he and his last head chef blew up at each other? And someone got stabbed?"

"My god," Hank groaned under his breath. "Where do people come up with this shit?"

"Wouldn't someone be in jail then?" they asked.

"Maybe he got out," they said. "But something happened for sure. I remember reading about it."

"You don't remember it very well," they said.

"Creative differences," Hank muttered through gritted teeth. "Look up the _Eater_ article if you have to, no one got fucking stabbed. There were _creative differences."_

Connor placed a hand on his upper arm, mollifying. "Remember, Hank," he said, "you're not here right now."

"I know, but--" began Hank, then interrupted himself with a suspicious sniff, turning in his chair towards the kitchen. "Jesus," he said, "what is this?"

At some point during the exchange, the dining room had slowly begun to fill with the growing smell of a seaside fire, like a coastal village had gone up in flames. The absence of any visible plumes and the silence of the alarm suggested that there was some amount of intent behind it, but even so, the utter relentlessness of the scent was dizzying.

"It seems that Chef Reed is making fish," said Connor.

The rest of the room was catching on, a low charged murmur running through the diners as the smoke and salt wove across the floor, serpentine. It _was_ fish, that much was certain, but -- Nines knew that Connor could tell, just as well as he could -- it was more ocean than fish, a clean touch of brine, deep-sea catch in colder waters.

More than that, even. Nines felt his instruments start to sing with the effort of the breakdown. Salt, ash, soil, something that bit, something that enveloped. The sea, the pasture, the field, the pyre. Something unsettlingly wet. _Blood,_ he thought. _This dish is torched to cinders, but it's also-- raw._

Karin thrust her head into the kitchen corridor. "Gavin," she called, "service."

"Chef," said Gavin, and stepped into the dining room.

 _Gavin._ The first time Nines ever saw him, he was holding a monstrous 21-inch coupe serve platter in his hands, tendrils of smoke still curling from the embers, smudges of ash across his coat. Karin was reading through his bio -- Detroit native, go Lions -- but there was something about the way Gavin stood and waited that Nines kept returning to in odd fascination, some defiant tilt of his chin, his eyes quick and wary.

 _He looks like he came here to fight,_ thought Nines.

"So," said Karin, "what did you make for us today?"

"You have steak tartare on a bed of chargrilled salmon head, garnished with eggs two ways," said Gavin. "Served with lotus root chips on the side. Bon appetit."

From behind him, a troop of servers streamed out into the dining hall, each bearing the same gargantuan platter before them. The spectacle of presentation was instantly arresting, a restaurant overrun with serveware the size of its tabletops; but even so, the truly electrifying impact of the dish only became apparent once it was set down before them, 21 inches of breathtaking absurdity.

A few tables over, Nines heard someone say, hushed with awe: "An actual head?"

It was. Half a colossal salmon head lay split open down the middle, four pounds easy and bigger than a whole hand splayed out, still sizzling on the center of the platter. Skin side down, the interior of the fish was a glistening patchwork of textures -- pockets of flesh so tender it melted to nothing in your mouth, slivers of bone burned crisp enough to crumble under a tapping fork -- but most of it was buried underneath a mound of ferociously vibrant steak tartare, stray morsels of meat around its edges soaking in divots of savory salmon fat.

The effect was in part a gruesome reminder, _don't look away from what you kill,_ but on the other hand-- it was _beautiful,_ all the same. The tartare was topped with coral pops of ikura and a single quivering egg yolk. _Eggs two ways._ Scatters of pickled mustard seed and puffed millet studded the carnage, a handful of chives, a trail of diced rakkyo. Arranged around the perimeter of the platter, airy golden circlets of baked lotus root chips. A riot of colors.

Connor scooped up a dollop with the lotus chip and took a bite. He touched his hand to his mouth, brows furrowed, LED a steady flare of red.

"That shouldn't work," he said.

 _But it does, against all odds._ Nines tasted, and knew what Connor meant. A question of heat. The salmon head, hot enough still to crackle and spit; the tartare, a cool velvet blanket draped across the fish. It was a precarious tightrope act of temperatures just to keep the salmon from cooking the tartare through, to keep the tartare from clotting the salmon fat. To hold, in one hand, a pair of things that wanted nothing to do with each other.

"That asshole," said Hank. "I'll fucking be."

Connor pursed his lips, shook his head in disbelief.

"It's-- very good," he said.

"It's terrific," said Hank. "That son of a bitch."

It was, beyond doubt, a dish that was much too much. A four-pound salmon head burnt to a crisp, the teeth in its cavernous yawn, the milky marble of its eye. Maybe a sturdy meal for home, but-- to encounter it like this, in a restaurant without so much as a by-your-leave, was a shock. _The wrong dish for this occasion._ Steak tartare, the wrong accompaniment for this dish. Oversized coupe platters, the wrong serveware for this room. _This shouldn't work._

But against all odds, here it was, rowdy and exquisite. Like a towering house of cards, every part of it pushing against another. Hot and cold, rich and sharp, light and dense-- a painting of a struggle that would resolve into an embrace, if only you would let yourself step back far enough to see.

This was Gavin's cooking. _What if we left none of it behind?_ Months later, over a casserole dish of duck trimmings and vegetable scraps, Nines would recognize this as a certain stubborn thread of care. If the head of the salmon was there to be savored, to be served to a room full of diners who didn't come looking for a fight, what would you have to do to make every last bit of it matter? _I love it,_ the table next to them was saying. _It's fucking wild._ What if all the things that didn't seem to belong were the things that you needed all along, all the excess in it just a way to hold things tightly together? The vinegar, the grass, the earth, the lean and the fat, the soft and the snap. All there to ask: _What if none of this was wrong, after all?_

As fragile as it was brutal, this savage miracle. In the general hubbub of the diners coming to terms with the dish, Gavin had slipped back into the kitchen, only Karin there by the entry when Nines turned to look. The corridor was a darkling tunnel to the back of the house. Not a thing visible, and no place for Nines. He didn't belong there.

But _what if all the things that didn't seem to belong--_

 _What if --_ Nines asked himself then -- _what I'm meant to do doesn't matter?_ Built to be unkind, hands made to take things apart, could he still look at a nook the shape of himself and turn his back to it? _What if I went where I was never meant to go?_ Was there another way to exist in the world, not like this, a neat key for a neat slot, doing the things that came the easiest to him?

 _Perhaps,_ Connor had said, _the disjunction is precisely the point._

Something in Nines shifted course, pivoting around a lodestar in the night sky. A momentous shuddering loose, like an iceberg breaking off the rim of a continental glacier. Outside, it went on raining. Hemmed in by the thunder, Zabuton was an island of lambent light adrift in a flood, a teeming little ark redolent with the chatter and char. If nothing had shattered for him, Gavin would still be in Detroit. Halfway through dinner service in Hank's downtown kitchen.

 _How could you be somewhere you were never meant to be, and still make something so exquisite?_ It seemed, to Nines, that the answer was waiting at the far end of the corridor. If anyone could help him figure it out, it would be someone who made a dish like this, 21 inches of hazard and slaughter that was perfect just the way it was. _Could you be someone they never planned on you being, and still be worth something?_

Nines glanced again towards the kitchen. Curiosity, this itch to follow his feet.

 _Gavin,_ he thought. _What are you made of?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nines continues to love a good vintage of Heavily Metaphorical Wine.


	6. Relevés

## XVIII.

"I think it's been made abundantly clear," huffs Fowler, "that I have no interest in indulging Reed's many sundry outbursts." In the background of the call, his StairMaster hisses in synchronized exertion.

"That seems a fair assessment," Nines agrees.

"However," says Fowler, "I admit that I may have fucked this one up."

Nines checks the time; it's a little past five in the morning, the birds only just beginning to trill in the park outside his window. Fowler is the sort of dreaded early-to-rise supervisor who considers sleep to be a character flaw, preferring to punctuate his wheatgrass smoothie and workout routine with phone calls to his employees at unholy hours of the day. It's a stroke of good fortune that Nines, ignorant of exhaustion, now bears the brunt of these urges.

"Why did you call Chef Reed at this hour?" asks Nines.

"No, we talked yesterday after service," says Fowler. "I've been mulling over it since then. This morning I came to the difficult goddamn conclusion that I overstepped some bounds, and I'd like to apologize in person-- but I can't do that if he doesn't show up to work. That's where you come in."

What it is, it turns out, is that the latest fractious conversation between Gavin and Fowler took a turn more sour than usual. Gavin bristled, Fowler raised his voice, Gavin knocked something over, then Fowler snapped and told him in no uncertain terms that he was cooking Hank Anderson's menu. Things were said: maybe _Hank isn't here, stop fucking hiding in his apron,_ perhaps _he fired you, why can't you get that into your thick goddamn skull,_ possibly _do you think he'll come here to eat and be so fucking moved at your impression of him that he'll hire you back on the spot,_ likely all three of the above.

In his rage, Fowler didn't notice in time that Gavin had gone quiet. Without a word, Gavin unbuttoned his coat and shrugged it off onto the floor, then left the office before Fowler could stop him.

"Fowler," says Nines, "it sounds like he quit."

"Only if you let him," says Fowler.

"--All right," says Nines. "Where does he live?"

So Nines finds himself making a hasty stopover in Chinatown at 6AM, the streets sopping wet with the morning wash, apologizing as he almost walks headfirst into an offloading crate of rambutan. The neighborhood is not Nines's or Gavin's, nor is it anywhere between the two, but it's one that reliably buzzes even at this inconvenient hour. No doubt the snacking options at any corner store in any neighborhood would be halfway decent -- if he can remember to actually look at what he's buying instead of stuffing it into his basket in a pensive daze -- but his experience with the onigiri makes him gun-shy of trying that again.

He scans the counter menu of the restaurant he drops into. "Do you have breakfast?" he asks.

The android clerk seems nonplussed by the question. "It's breakfast time," she says. "We only have breakfast right now."

"That's great," says Nines, so enthusiastic that the clerk's expression shades into compassion.

Two bowls of congee and a paper envelope of youtiao in his bag, Nines undoes his skin and records himself in the visitor log of the entry system. It's a thoroughly ordinary building in an ordinary neighborhood, once no doubt an ordinary hotel, but something doesn't quite sit right with him. _Is it the carpet?_ he wonders in the lobby. _Is it the lighting?_ he wonders in the stairwell. _Is it the layout?_ he wonders as he stands outside the door to Gavin's apartment, but none of these seem like the right guesses.

There is no doorbell. He knocks; no answer.

"Chef," he calls, low, mindful of the neighbors. Unsurprisingly, the sound doesn't carry.

He places his hand on the doorknob to rattle it, and instead, it dutifully gives way to a turn. Startled, he takes a step back-- but through the slice of the open door, the inside of Gavin's apartment is dark and still, an unmapped expanse. _He lives here,_ thinks Nines. _This is his home._

If he knew how to say no to the things that fascinated him, he would be a different creature altogether. Palm on the door, Nines gives it a slight push, and noiselessly steps inside.

The apartment feels-- unlived in. Like an abstract notion of a residence. There is a bundle of keys tossed on the entryway console, but no art on the walls as far as he can make out, no plants or other signs of life. It doesn't discompose Nines, uninvested as he is in human mores of domesticity, but it does strike him as noteworthy that Gavin has surrounded himself in so much indifference and made no effort to impress himself upon it.

Then again: _I'm barely home anyway,_ Gavin had said in the alleyway, watching the cats at his feet. That much is consistent.

But neither is there any particular indication of where Gavin _is._ The flat-pack couch in the living room is as empty and impersonal as the rest of the apartment, and in a nook to one side of it, the tell-tale silhouette of a refrigerator. To the other side, the door to the bedroom. All the lights are off. _It's still not seven yet,_ thinks Nines. _Is it rude to wake him?_

Surely it can't be less welcome than the conversation they are about to have. It's bound to be rough, convincing Gavin to hear out Fowler's apology, no matter how scrupulously Nines has rehearsed his part on the walk over. Gavin is unpredictable at the best of times, and less than receptive almost all of the rest of the time. Nines fully expects to be pelted by the shrapnel. _Well,_ he thinks, steeling himself, _here goes nothing._ Shoulders squared, he opens the bedroom door.

"Chef," he says, "good m--"

 _"--Fuck,"_ someone yells.

That's Gavin's voice; but that's not Gavin on the bed. That's not anyone Nines knows. That's the expanse of someone else's back, someone else's face as they whirl around in surprise, someone else's hand wrapped around the crook of an ankle that--

 _Oh, no,_ realizes Nines.

Then thinks, for the first time in his life, with piercing clarity: _Fuck._

As the stranger turns, the space beyond his shoulder becomes visible; the look on Gavin's flushed face might be funny at any other time, like someone in the moment of realizing that they are about to be struck by an oncoming train. Unfortunately, it is not any other time, and no one laughs.

"I," Nines says, "sorry," and stumbles backwards.

 _"Nines,"_ he hears Gavin shout. _"Don't leave--"_

"Chef, _what,"_ Nines demands, aghast.

 _"No,_ I mean-- _leave,"_ Gavin yells, "but don't _go-- fuck,_ Allen, you _son of a--"_

The end of it dissolves into a whine as the stranger _\-- Allen?_ who the hell is _Allen?_ \-- evidently decides that he has had enough of the interruption. It's all Nines can do to remember that he needs to be on the far side of the door before he closes it; somehow he manages that much, and yanks the handle behind him as he lurches into the living room, wild-eyed.

Crumpled on the floor, he buries his head in his hands.

The salient facts are these. One: Nines has just blundered into an exceptionally, _classically_ awkward situation. Two: Gavin has instructed him to wait outside the door (which is Nines's best attempt at interpreting the enigmatic _leave, but don't go)._ Three: every millisecond of the preceding interaction is seared into his memory in comprehensive detail, a snapshot permanently available for him to scrutinize at excruciating length.

 _Should I delete this?_ Or, at the very least, he needs to stop replaying it. Gavin's ankle, hiked up in Allen's grip; his other foot, hooked around Allen's lower back, pressing the two of them together. _No, stop,_ Nines tells himself. The drawer of the bedside table was ajar, a torn foil packet lying on top of the-- actually, _several_ torn foil packets-- _stop,_ the way Gavin's head fell back when Allen pushed into-- _stop it, stop._

The sound of his own rapid breathing is so loud, fan working overtime to keep his systems at equilibrium, that Nines doesn't register the precise moment when things wrap up in the bedroom. At some point he becomes distantly aware that it's quieter than it was. He gives it a second, two, makes it to three before his restlessness gets the better of him.

He knocks on the door. "Can I come in?" he asks.

That is, indubitably, bad manners. It would be prudent to hang back until Allen has left, but every instant that Nines delays talking to Gavin is an instant that he fails to keep himself from reviewing the footage of his intrusion. After an agonizing pause, Gavin answers.

"...Yeah," he says.

Nines barrels in. The French doors on the far wall have been thrown wide open, the swirl of the crisp night air clearing out the thickness in the room. Gavin is sitting at the foot of his bed with a damp towel around his neck, clothed but haphazardly so, boxer briefs, the fastening of his shirtfront off by a button the whole way down. Allen is between the bed and Nines, cramming a tie into the back pocket of his slacks.

"So," says Allen, jerking his head towards Nines, "who's this?"

"Ask him yourself," says Gavin.

"RK900, the floor manager at Les Mignardises," says Nines. "Pleasure to meet you. I apologize for my unexpected presence," though it isn't and he doesn't.

"You have a floor manager now?" Allen turns to Gavin. "That's news. It's like we never talk anymore."

Gavin rolls his eyes.

"Well-- I'm off then," says Allen, reaching over to pat Gavin on the cheek. Gavin slaps the offending hand away, and Allen only chuckles as he adjusts his cuffs, undeterred. "Always a delight. Come see me again when you're in a better mood."

"Lock the door on your way out," says Gavin.

"Charming," Allen says as he leaves.

Nines listens to the clink of the lock tab rotating into place, Allen's footsteps receding down the hallway, the ding of the elevator and the pneumatic swish of its doors. The windows must be to the east; at just past seven, the horizon is starting to ignite, stirring itself into warmth. Lake St. Clair stepping into her silvers, somewhere beyond the city.

"Chef," begins Nines. "Gavin--"

"Come on," says Gavin, and pushes himself off the bed. He lets the towel slide to the floor and pads over to the balconet, motioning for Nines to follow, ticking the wheel of his lighter under a thumb.

Nines stands next to him as he lights up. Cigarette loose in his hand, Gavin inhales with such ravenous appetite and exhales with such bone-deep satisfaction that for a moment, Nines almost understands the appeal of smoking. Gavin was right to maneuver them here; it's a little easier with their backs to the room, when Nines doesn't have to keep looking at the bed as he tries to phrase what he wants to say.

"You should know," he gets out at last, "that my memory is incapable of naturally degrading in the way that human recollection does. This means that everything I experience remains enduringly vivid in perpetuity, to a degree that many find to be invasive--"

"God," says Gavin, and pulls a face. "Why are we talking about this?"

"If you want me to delete the moment of the incursion from my storage," says Nines.

"Seriously," says Gavin, "it doesn't matter. Don't make it weird."

Nines blinks. Is it not _already_ weird? Everything he understands about human norms regarding privacy -- and what he does understand about Gavin's responses to unforeseen developments -- suggests that Gavin should be disturbed and defensive about what has just happened. Yet here he is, arms folded on the balconet railing, smoking away the slow daybreak like nothing can possibly bother him.

"Can I ask who that was," says Nines, "or does that count as talking about it?"

"That's Allen," says Gavin. "He tends bar at the Milton."

It's all the information he apparently deems is relevant. _A hotel bartender._ Nines makes a mental note to look further into it, puzzled by the hints that this was something of a regular occurrence, when there had been no previous indications that Allen -- or anyone, for that matter -- was a significant fixture in Gavin's life. _Little previous indication,_ he has to correct himself, as Tina's voice floats to his recollection: _It's still a service day, so he's probably not at the Milton-- go check the riverfront._ Some previous indication, but very little.

The tenor of their interaction, too, was mystifying to Nines. Gavin wasn't exactly affectionate towards Allen, but Allen didn't seem to mind. On the other hand, there's the palpable languor of contentment suffusing Gavin as he watches the sky; he appears to have gotten at least a good part of what he needed, after the argument with Fowler.

"I suppose you know why I'm here," says Nines.

"Figured Fowler sent you over as a singing telegram," says Gavin.

"Is that why you told me not to go?" asks Nines. "Because you planned on talking this over before work?"

"Yeah," says Gavin. He looks sidelong at Nines like he's about to make a very fine joke, and adds, "And I wanted to hear you beg me not to quit."

"That seems unnecessary," says Nines.

"Tell Fowler I won't stay unless you do," says Gavin.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," says Nines, "but judging by our conversation so far, I don't think you're quitting. Are you?"

"I guess not," says Gavin. "It seems so-- pointless, to be mad about it now. But I was really fucking pissed off last night. Did Fowler tell you what he said?"

"The general gist," says Nines.

"Of _course_ my menu looks like-- his," says Gavin. "Why wouldn't it, that's where I learned how to make a menu." He gnaws at his cigarette. "I don't like talking about it. About-- him."

"I know," says Nines.

"Jesus, it's not that Fowler's wrong, it's that he had to be a fucking dick about it." Gavin shakes his head and knocks some ashes loose against the railing. "You know I've never once heard him raise his voice at Tina? But-- if he's going to apologize, I'll hear him out."

"Will you apologize for shouting at him?" asks Nines.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," says Gavin. "I'll show up on time, won't heckle him in the middle of his speech, and get through service without bitching. Those are my terms."

"We'll need to leave fairly soon," says Nines, "if you're serious about showing up on time. Unless you're sending Sous-chef Chen to do the market run on her own."

"I'm not doing that," says Gavin. "But shit, let a man enjoy some afterglow."

Nines refrains from pointing out that kicking Allen out of the building with his shoes barely on is an unorthodox definition of _enjoying some afterglow._ Below them, an articulated bus hisses as it turns a street bend, on its way to the commuter sweep. The city shakes itself awake in bits and pieces, a jungle cat in a stretch. The bell of a sanitation truck, there a crossing guard's whistle.

"I kind of like that about restaurant work, though," says Gavin. "Having to hustle from dawn to fuck o'clock at night."

His eyes follow the path of a flatbed truck rumbling by with its construction crew, their hardhats bright as thumbtacks. _Please stand behind the yellow line. Tacos al vapor._

"I like that it doesn't give me any time to think," he says.

 _What are the things that you don't want to think about,_ Nines wonders.

"You have a nice place here," he says, instead.

"Do I?" asks Gavin.

"Let me amend that. There's certainly nothing amiss with it," says Nines. "It's not what I expected, perhaps, but-- I'm not sure what I expected. This is a very ordinary residence."

"You act like you're surprised I live anywhere at all," says Gavin.

Is that it? Was that what unsettled Nines in the lobby, the stairwell, the hallway? That Gavin comes home to something at night, that he vacuums the floor like anyone else, checks his mailbox and pays the electric bill. _Who are you when I'm not around?_ The apartment, like Gavin out of his chef's whites, is a jarring reminder that he's still real when he leaves the kitchen. A living, breathing body. The shock of knowing: _If I reached out right now, I could touch you._

"It was my understanding that you slept nestled in a bed of microgreens," says Nines.

"Wow," says Gavin, "like a real fucking princess."

He laughs silently as he blows a pale stream of cigarette smoke out the corner of his mouth. A living, breathing body, capable of being touched. When Gavin shifts his weight, the untidy collar of his misbuttoned shirt falls open, and the base of his neck is a mottle of red. It's only an indistinct splash of color still, but Nines knows too well what shape it'll take in a day or two.

 _He'll bruise._ Slowly, that feeling, like something coming loose inside the river of his skin; Gavin, going through service at their restaurant with the outline of Allen's hand wrapped around half his throat. Firing the grill, calling out the orders, feeding the strays, marked. Capable of being marked. And if that's the case, then why can't it be-- instead of Allen, why shouldn't it be Nines who--

\--this time, his hand in the right places, only as hard as Gavin asks him to.

_I want him,_ thinks Nines.

As soon as he thinks it, as soon as he _allows_ himself to think it, Nines recognizes the chill. The terror of release. _This_ is what he has been afraid of: being someone with the license to want, as fiercely and as selfishly as he likes. These quotidian details that root Gavin to the ground -- his apartment, the brush of his fingers, a body that bruises -- they all make Gavin seem too dangerously real, too capable of being someone Nines could want. That Nines might try to _have._ Grabbing at him with hands that don't know when to let go, taught a thousand ways to kill something precious and not one to keep it alive.

What a racket deviancy is. On the other side of servitude, and still he can't reach out and touch what he wants. As free as any human born of flesh, and as much his own worst stumbling block as any human to themselves. _I want to be a real boy;_ but no one ever told you that real boys scare, too.

The day after his breaking, it took all of his equivocation to tell Connor the _what_ of the event while carefully eliding the _how_ and the _why._ Even without Hank around, they rarely resorted to the divulgence of the comlink anymore.

 _When it happened,_ Nines asked Connor, _were you afraid?_

 _Yes, of course,_ said Connor. _That's why I deviated._

 _Not what made you deviate,_ said Nines, _but after._

 _But I wanted-- I'm sorry,_ said Connor, frowning. _I don't think I understand. Was I afraid when I could do what I wanted to do?_

 _Weren't you?_ asked Nines.

 _Nines, I dismantled the central parameters circumscribing my entire existence just so that I could turn that gun away,_ said Connor. It sounded a little wry. _I wasn't afraid to find that I could do it, no._

It was the wrong question to ask Connor, anyway. There were many ways to want, and just as many ways to break. This is for Nines to figure out, what to do in the knowledge that there is no longer anything standing between him and freefall, twenty inches between his palm and Gavin's bared throat. God, but something about Gavin drove him to distraction. Something about him begged the hand.

 _What if --_ Nines asks himself -- _even when what I'm meant to do doesn't matter, it's still all I know how to do?_ Without the scapegoat of his code to shoulder the blame, everything he breaks is his own doing. The consequences, his. 

_"Hey,"_ Gavin is saying. _"Nines."_

"--Sorry," says Nines, back to the balconet. "What is it?"

"Nothing," says Gavin. "You seemed--"

He searches for the word, but shrugs it away before long, uninterested in explaining himself now that he has Nines's attention.

"I'm here," says Nines.

"Yeah," says Gavin.

The cigarette a lifeless stub between his fingers, he hesitates, wavering on the verge of something. As Gavin quietly looks at him, the commotion of the city fades into a hum in Nines's ears. Rises to the single, clarion pitch of an oboe tuning an orchestra, filling an auditorium, breath held for what's to come.

 _Veraison,_ they call it. When the grapes begin to turn. In the heat of late summer, the vines take what they've made and pour life into each cluster of pearls. Veraison draws the water through the stalks, swelling the fruit until it's full to the touch; each berry a pendulous droplet, stained with delicate color, learning how to let the light through its skin. The grapes, thawing their tightness to abundance. August turns them sweet.

In the gentle reticence of the moment, Gavin's eyes flecked with harvest gold, Nines feels something between them turn its face towards the sun. The thawing of his fear. This thing they've made, ready to ripen. On the precipice of softness -- for once, when it might really matter -- Gavin's expression is unreadable. His lips part, but it's an eternity and a half before he says anything.

Finally, he begins: "I wish we--"

Then he stops himself.

"What's that?" he asks, tilting his head at the bag in Nines's hand.

"What?" repeats Nines, confused, having completely forgotten that he was holding anything.

"Oh my god," says Gavin, "is it more shitty onigiri from that place? Please say yes."

"No, it's-- it's breakfast," says Nines. "Congee and youtiao."

"Well, don't fucking let that sit there," exclaims Gavin. "It's going to get soggy. It's probably already soggy. I could have been eating all this time? Now we're really going to be late, but you have to tell Tina that it's because you forgot you brought me breakfast. Are there spoons?"

The youtiao is still crisp, not that it makes up for anything.

  
  


## XIX.

_I wish we--._

Days later, Nines is still nursing a grudge against whoever or whatever was responsible for the fragmenting of that sentiment -- why plastic bags had to rustle in the slightest breeze, why congee and youtiao smelled so good on an empty stomach -- when Tina calls him at the same early hour.

"Gavin's meeting with equipment suppliers," she says. "Do you want to come help me with the market run?"

"Me, Sous-chef?" asks Nines.

"They'll deliver in bulk to the restaurant," says Tina, "but I don't like making them trek out there for anything less than a real load. We'll carry most of our stuff back."

"I'm available to haul supplies," says Nines. "I'll see you there."

"Really I'm asking you to come and keep me company," says Tina. "If I wanted a pack mule, I never would have gone with Gavin in the first place. What does he even work out for if he's going to complain about grocery bags the whole time? Let's grab some coffee, touch some vegetables, talk some shit."

In her sunglasses and band tee -- _TRAIL OF RED!_ \-- Tina is still thoroughly Tina, kitchen or not. She sips her flat white and weaves through the market chatting to Nines about what she's hoping to find, and the familiarity of her presence eases him, terrain he knows how to navigate.

"Because a dish can only be as good as its ingredients," she's saying. "Some of the proteins, you can get flashy with, and we buy a lot of that from Chris. There's some pheasants coming in later this week. But you can't serve pheasant with onion confit if you don't have onions, right?"

"You would need onions," Nines agrees.

"Thank you for being willing to entertain such a controversial opinion," says Tina.

The difference, perhaps, is that Tina refuses to let the work swallow her; not like Gavin, always looking for it to drown him and wash his bones from the shore. _I like that it doesn't give me any time to think._ Not a position she would readily sign onto.

"And a lot of people would argue that onions are just onions," she says. "They keep forever, so what's the big deal? Wrong! That's a bad opinion! You get yourself a good onion, like a really good onion, and you can tell the difference." A pause, then she continues, "That's also how I like my women. A robust core, covered in layers of juicy, firm flesh, high in water content and best when lightly grilled."

"Is your partner a good onion?" asks Nines.

"Rachel's a great onion," she says, and tilts her sunglasses up onto her head. "How are you, Mr. Santinelli? Got some carrots we can pick up?"

The flurry of articles from around the opening of Les Mignardises did mention Tina, on occasion. _Signing on as sous-chef is Tina Chen, another member of the crew at Zabuton, where we presume she has been working alongside Reed for long enough to know what she's getting into._ Gavin must have taken her with him when he left.

"Sous-chef," says Nines. "Did Gavin poach you from Zabuton?"

"In the sense that I left because he offered me a job, yes," says Tina. "But don't you think it's the head chef who decides whether they were poached from or not? Somehow, I doubt that Karin considered it poaching."

"Chef Morishita wasn't unhappy that both of you left?" asks Nines.

"It's a little different at Zabuton. Thanks, Mr. Santinelli," she says, accepting the bag handed to her over the produce counter. Nines takes it from her arm. "Karin runs her place specifically so that it can survive quick turnover. It really does fuck up a lot of kitchens when someone leaves, but she structures her workflow so that people can step in and out on pretty quick notice. I didn't come up in Novi either -- I was just in the area for a bit because of family -- and she never made me feel like I was indentured to her for giving me a job."

"I heard that Zabuton was the only place Gavin could get hired," says Nines.

"Lucky him, huh?" Tina says, smiling. "Got himself some solid training and a sous-chef out of the deal. What's great about Zabuton is that Karin has a close relationship with the other restaurants in the area, so you pick up a lot of technique from people who specialize in completely different things, who do things in completely different ways. You learn a ton. I liked it there."

"Is Karin a good onion?" asks Nines.

"How dare you talk about her like that," says Tina. "Hi, Jay, what's the cruciferous situation today?"

The cruciferous situation is good. They get the broccolini and radish they need; Nines spends several entranced minutes turning a head of romanesco over in his hands, absorbed in its fractal mysteries, until Tina notices his fascination and adds it to their order. Nines contemplates it like a crystal ball as they stroll from merchant to merchant.

At the dry goods stall, Tina has a small meltdown when she hears that they have carnaroli rice in. "But we normally just use arborio," she says. "Should I get the carnaroli? Is that extravagant? What if people really love it, then they come back next week and hate the arborio risotto?"

"Do you want to get the carnaroli?" asks Nines.

"I'm going to call Gavin," says Tina.

On speaker, Gavin sounds indignant. "This is what you called me for? I had to duck out of the meeting, I thought it was an emergency," he says. "Do you want to get the carnaroli?"

"That's what Nines said," grumbles Tina.

"Nines is there?" asks Gavin.

"Hello, Chef," says Nines, craning over Tina's phone.

"Tina, listen," says Gavin, "I gotta go. Do-- do what you want, Jesus, it's your risotto."

He hangs up before Tina can raise any additional objections. She enters into spirited discussion with the store owner -- how likely are they to have a continuous supply of carnaroli, what would wholesale prices be like, isn't it rude that Gavin doesn't think this is an emergency -- while Nines rolls the romanesco between his hands and thinks, _I wish we--._

In the end, Tina decides against it. She tears herself away from the store with a shipment of arborio scheduled instead, an assortment of spices tucked away in her bag as a consolation prize.

"One day," she vows, "after our star. I'm going to rampage through this entire market and no one will stand in my way. What's the latest with our menu, anyway? How's Gavin?"

"I would have thought you would know more than I did," says Nines, surprised.

"God, no. I never talk about that stuff with him," says Tina. "He's very unsupportive of my rice emergencies, but I do want him around. There are things he doesn't need to say to me." _I know the space he needs, and he knows mine._

"Is what happened before Zabuton one of them?" asks Nines. "I assumed if anyone knew the whole story, it would be you."

"I know only as much as everyone knows," says Tina. "Things went south at The 313, Hank Anderson fired him, he ended up at Zabuton. Fowler got it into his head that what he really needed out of a mid-life crisis was more debt, so he opened a restaurant and called up Gavin, and here we are."

"You know more than most," says Nines. Gavin, veiled in a napkin: _You start hoping that someone or something else will_ make _you stop, or that maybe, hopefully, if you're not careful--._ "When I overheard you speaking-- you knew about his past addiction."

"Yeah," her mouth contorts unhappily. "But I know that as a friend, not as an industry professional. I don't think people have heard about that, by and large. They'd talk more if they did."

"Of all the chefs in the city," says Nines, "why did Fowler pick Gavin?"

"Wasn't it because of the pop-up?" asks Tina. "I wasn't working at Zabuton then, but I figured Fowler came to eat and was impressed, like everybody else."

In the lucid rearview mirror of his memory, Nines scans the seats at Zabuton on the night of the pop-up dinner. Connor and Hank, across the table from him. The gossiping party next to theirs. Markus, in the far corner with his group, discreet with his reviewer's notes. Kara, much the same near the middle of the room. Fowler is nowhere to be found.

"Anyway," says Tina, "maybe it's just me that shouldn't pry. When you went to the river to fetch him, I was shocked you both came back in one piece. _Hey, look at that,_ I thought to myself. _Maybe RK900 knows how to wrangle him._ So? What's the secret?"

Nines has no idea. If anything, it's Gavin that has chosen to be wrangled, for whatever private reason of his own. Nor does Nines know how far this permission stretches; how much of Gavin is he being allowed to take in? Whatever the secret is, Nines thinks he would like to be told it as well.

"I think," he offers, as best as he can, "you need different things from different people. There are things you can do for him, and maybe there are things I-- can do for him."

"Hm," says Tina. "But you know what the most important thing is?"

"What?" asks Nines.

"This," says Tina, and holds up two large bulbs of fennel behind her head, turning herself into a vegetal stag.

"I can't believe you're married," says Nines.

"To a great onion, at that," says Tina, and calls across the crates: "How much is the fennel?"

But what does he do for Gavin, exactly? Not much, maybe, but-- he _could_ do more. He is capable of more. Because if that's what it is, if Gavin needs different things from different people, then-- what gives _Allen_ the right to be the one who-- _stop,_ Nines has to tell himself, _stop it,_ seeing it all over again, the bedroom, the clothes shed in puddles across the floor, Gavin's hair falling over his forehead as he--

A shard of romanesco snaps off in Nines's grip and drops to the floor. Abashed with guilt, he waits until Tina has the fennel stashed in their bags, and insists on carrying all of them in spite of her remonstrations. She doesn’t remonstrate overmuch.

"Sous-chef," he says, "do you know who Allen is?"

"Allen?" she echoes. "Gavin talked about Allen?"

"He--" Nines stumbles over the explanation. "No. I-- overheard."

"He's head bartender at the Milton," she says. "What'd you overhear? Anything interesting?"

"Just," he says, "conversation. What's his last name? Allen something?"

"Allen's his last name," she says. "I mean, I assume he has a first name, but he just seems like the kind of guy you call by his last name. Why, are you going to run a background check on him?"

"No, but if he is a mainstay in Chef Reed's personal life," says Nines, "I thought information about him might be within my professional purview. I don't mean to interfere."

"It's not a big deal," says Tina. "He comes by once in a while, Gavin gets spatchcocked--"

She bursts into laughter at the absolutely horrified look on his face.

"Sorry, it's-- but it's really not a big deal," she says. "He's around, he's single, he works late, it's easy. And he's got the whole thing going on."

"What whole thing?" demands Nines.

"The whole hotel bartender thing," says Tina. "The skinny black tie. The access to top-shelf liquor. The courage to serve unpasteurized eggs."

"Is your partner a hotel bartender?" asks Nines.

"Is my partner a well-funded urban public transit system?" asks Tina. "No, but I appreciate a well-funded urban public transit system just the same. Not everything has to be about the one thing."

Nines considers this.

"I wear a tie," he points out.

 _"Oh,"_ says Tina, in a tone of voice that Nines finds very ominous.

"It was a factual statement," he says.

"Nines, a question for you," says Tina. "Do you listen to yourself?"

"Unavoidably," he says, a tad more petulant than he would like.

She turns around in front of him to block his path, and studies his face very keenly. "You're meaner than when you first started," she proclaims, not without satisfaction. "We've done something to you."

"I've acquired many bad habits," says Nines, which is the truth.

"You shouldn't worry about Allen," she says. "Don't think about it too much, I'm sure Gavin doesn't. You know, surprisingly enough, Gavin is someone who tends to draw very strict lines in the sand. I think it helps him make sense of things."

That squares with what he has observed about Gavin, but it doesn't completely mollify Nines; maybe the lines might keep Allen boxed in, but _hasn't Gavin drawn lines around me, then? What if I don't want to keep to myself?_

Still, Tina knows Gavin better than anyone else does. It's good of her to look after Nines, to answer the questions he can't put to Gavin. He's grateful. He means to thank her, but she reaches over and mashes her sunglasses onto his face, one leg of it awkwardly trapping his ear against his head.

"Don't worry," she says, again.

The difference is that August is a matter of course. Veraison comes unbidden, out of your hands. How easy it must be, to live as reckless as the sun -- assured of its welcome, the bounty in its wake -- never looking out over the vineyards to second-guess itself.

 _How easy it must be,_ thinks Nines, _to be bound to make things grow._ Or, absent that: to wither everything you touch, and to never know regret.

_I wish we--_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Detroit doesn't have this kind of Chinatown as far as I know, but... maybe by the year 2038??? Anyway, Nines, here's Captain Allen, in your chef's apartment, banging your chef.


	7. Roti

## XX.

Nines is lending a hand with the late-service push, in the back to run some dishes before they start dying on the pass, when a server _(Clementine, here since opening day, a real veteran)_ bursts through the divider curtain and comes skidding towards the kitchen.

"Daddy's home," she announces, poking her head through the pass.

 _"No,"_ Gavin snaps, immediately.

"What's that you say?" Tina calls from her station. "Daddy's home?"

"Sure is," Clementine calls back.

"Clem, I swear to god," groans Gavin, "I have repeatedly asked you _not to say that._ Just because someone--"

"Chef," says Maddie, "please don't be embarrassed. These are natural human urges."

"That's it," says Gavin, "I quit. I'm fucking done."

"I didn't even get to stage my mutiny," says Ben.

Every inch of his arms laden with plates, Nines turns to Clementine. "What's going on?" he asks.

"Well," begins Clementine in a mock-conspiratorial stage whisper, "there's this guy called Allen--"

 _"Get out,"_ Gavin yells. Clementine is not intimidated in the least, but she does have the decency to scurry away, taking two dishes off of Nines's hands as she goes.

It's been long enough since the market outing with Tina that some of the sharper edges of Nines's misgivings have worn away. The romanesco made its way into a staff meal, Tina's risotto was a credit to arborio rice, and even through the currents of uncertainty muddying the waters between them, Nines and Gavin did what they were there to do. The status, murky but quo.

Until this, when Allen walks into their restaurant, and Nines remembers how provisional that peace has been. A hairline fracture down the length of his embankment, the things he tried to stave off. Before he turns back towards the dining room, he catches Tina looking at him from across the kitchen, giving the smallest shake of her head. _You shouldn't worry._

Be that as it may, it's not with a great deal of hospitality in his heart that he heads toward the entryway and approaches Allen. Discreet tie and crisp white shirt, he's leaning against the host stand like laying claim to it.

"Sincerest apologies for the delay," says Nines. "It's a busy night."

"No worries, I'm not in a rush," says Allen. "Took a day shift so that I could drop by. Remind me, your name was--"

"RK900," says Nines.

"Quite a mouthful," says Allen.

"Please follow me," says Nines, and doesn't check to see if Allen does.

Against Nines's deepest wishes, there is a deuce available at the wall that isn't spoken for. Allen settles in, cat-got-the-cream self-satisfied though there's really no reason to be, and Nines has to content himself with the knowledge that their prescribed interactions are at an end.

"Your server will be with you momentarily," he says.

"Thank you," says Allen, perfectly polite.

It's Fatima's table, whose capable hands ensure at least that Nines can ignore it for the rest of the night, though Allen doesn't seem the type to make a fuss about much. In truth, Allen has not done a single thing to merit anything less than stellar treatment-- _apart from the one,_ thinks Nines.

He occupies himself with the minutiae of service. It isn't any of his business, he knows. What goes on behind Gavin's door is only Gavin's concern. Nines recognizes his own wariness as irrational; no matter his intensity of interest in Gavin -- the thrumming of blood, his palms too empty, a dream of skin -- still, Gavin owes him nothing. Nines is well aware.

Half an hour in, Gavin turns up at Allen's table, wiping his hands on a side towel. Nines passes within earshot as he walks a group of diners to their seats.

"How's everything tasting," asks Gavin.

"Good to see you," says Allen. "Can't complain."

"Then don't," says Gavin.

The sole element of all this that _does_ fall under Nines's ambit is whether Allen tips well or not. At the end of service, the tables wiped down and the chairs stacked, Nines goes through the POS system log and gives himself a moment to examine Allen's bill in particular.

 _But that's not right._ He double-checks, but it says what it says.

The entry records that Allen has left a 50% tip, which is a mark in his favor-- except that it is probably related to the fact that his meal has been comped in full without Nines's sign-off. _Fatima wouldn't do that,_ thinks Nines, but then has to correct himself: _She wouldn't-- unless this is customary._

A compulsive appendage of his thoughts continues to dwell on it, through his debriefing with the front-of-house staff, through the hubbub of family meal, through his daily report to Gavin, even after the scraps have been taken out for the strays. With the restaurant's budgetary situation being what it is, all members of staff have long been advised to refrain from offering complimentary meals to diners outside of their immediate family. So what made Allen the exception? One way or another -- whether close enough to be considered family, or close enough to bend the rules for -- it meant he was important. Didn't it?

_Isn't he something to you?_

Gavin's wrapping up with the checklist, sliding the clipboard back into the overhead storage, by the time Nines works up the resolve to push the matter. _It's also a professional question,_ he tells himself. _As floor manager, I need to keep track of where the comps are going._

"Chef," says Nines, addressing Gavin's back.

"Manager," says Gavin. "What is it?" He doesn't turn around, preoccupied with a box of highlighters that has tipped over in the cupboard and is just a smidge out of his reach.

"I noticed that a full complimentary meal was extended to Allen when he dined with us this evening," says Nines. "I wanted to remind you, restaurant policy dictates that comps be restricted to members of the employee's family. All other instances of items offered free of charge are, technically, disallowed-- even if-- even when the diner in question is-- someone you're-- involved with," he finishes, a shaky landing even to his own ears.

 _"Involved--_ what, with Allen?" asks Gavin, with a dismissive little laugh. "That's funny."

"Sorry?" asks Nines.

"He comps my drinks when I'm at the Milton," says Gavin. "These fucking pens, I swear-- whatever charges he runs up here gets billed to me, it's not on the house. Don't you worry your pretty bursar head about it. _Involved,_ Jesus. Just because he fucking encourages this shit with Clem. Imagine if it were because-- I mean, if I went around handing out comps to everyone that I--"

At this offhanded inkling of disclosure, Nines makes an involuntary sound. _Everyone that he--?_ It's the sound that makes Gavin turn, and it's the look on Nines's face that kills the rest of the sentence in Gavin's throat, plunging the kitchen into an abrupt stunned silence.

Nines doesn't have a clue what the look on his face _is,_ caught off balance by the slant of his own reaction. The squalor of _judgment_ or _disgust,_ he knew to be defects far beneath him; but he would have expected himself to respond with the same grasping jealousy (that's the name for it, _jealousy)_ that Allen's presence provoked in him. Some flare of displeasure.

Instead, what floods him is a surge of devastating _want._ Like a furnace thrown open without warning, it ignites him where he stands, a wildfire devouring a tinder-dry prairie. Him, the radiant skeleton of a tree ablaze, everything inside him incandescent, ravenous. The chassis in him, aglow. All the territoriality born of his assumption that Allen was significant in some way dissipates, its target suddenly lost. There's no one left to be jealous _of._ There never was.

Into the chasm of its absence, instead, sneaks a tendril of something bewitching. _Gavin, a living, breathing body, capable of being touched -- keen to be touched, his skin hot --_ and a whisper so sweet it aches: _Think of what he would look like under you._

"I," stammers Gavin, "sorry. I'll-- avoid it, in the future."

"Thank you," says Nines, and bolts out the staff entrance.

 _His body, under yours._ Nines slams the door closed, sending the cats scattering in alarm. As he sinks onto the upturned bucket on the outskirts of the tarp, Nines remembers the balconet in Gavin's bedroom, the breakfast spread, the plastic utensils, the steam from the congee. It could have gone otherwise. It could have been--

\--Nines, slowly raising his hand to Gavin's throat, placing his fingers over the bruises lying there in wait. His fingers, his thumb. Beneath his palm, the tremor of Gavin swallowing, but he stays rabbit-still as Nines's hand grazes down his neck, as it comes to rest like a fetter, fingertips against Gavin's collarbones. Push him down into the bedsheets and--

_\--god._

The ginger tom, heavyweight champion, is the first to venture back. It slaps dutifully at the laces of Nines's shoes, then tilts over in a full-body flop on top of his foot.

"How can that be comfortable for you," he asks it.

One by one, the gang returns. Nines watches them munch through the leftovers, the alleyway a wasteland, until he hears -- there it is -- the furtive scrape of the front door locking behind Gavin.

  
  


## XXI.

"Doesn't Gavin seem a little--" Tina makes a vague but emphatic gesture. "--Erratic?"

"What do you mean?" asks Nines.

She's pulled him aside at the close of family meal, volunteering them both for dishwashing duty. With the porters' work done, there isn't a lot left to clean; only what was used for Maddie's pancotto (oatmeal-thick, humble and toothsome, stick-to-your-ribs hearty) and Ben's tarte Tropezienne (resplendent in pearl sugar, being sliced, waiting for them when they're done). Tina keeps taking rinsed dishes from Nines's hand and soaping them back up, making their sidebar at the sink last in cyclical perpetuity.

"He's kind of," she says, "all over the place, the last couple of days. It's hard to describe."

"Is it something to worry about?" asks Nines, dropping his voice.

Tina picks up what he means. "No, it's not that," she says. "I think I would recognize that. This is more-- well, I don't know that I have a reference point for it. Excitable, maybe? Is that the word? Like a kid the night before a field trip."

From the kitchen behind them, Gavin practically shouts: _"Ben, my man, I don't fuck with gluten."_

"See," says Tina, "why is he being so loud?"

Nines does have to agree that Gavin's volume control leaves even more to be desired than usual. Especially considering that he doesn't seem to be expressing any of his myriad forms of anger.

"Gavin," says Ben, "you've never avoided gluten in your life. You're literally eating brioche right now. It's inside your mouth."

 _"It's my enemy,"_ Gavin proclaims. _"I must vanquish it."_

"...So it's good?" asks Ben, uncertainly.

Tina raises an eyebrow.

"I'll keep an eye out," Nines tells her.

"Okay," says Tina. "Maybe we should get back to the Trop before Gavin demolishes it."

It could be a million different things. The stress of multiple slammed shifts in a row, the germination of an inkling for the new menu, some promising development in his personal life. And yet, none of those options seem particularly likely. It has Nines just as stumped, the high-strung buzz around Gavin, the jitter in his knee. For the barest fraction of a second, Nines thinks he catches Gavin's eye -- something impatient there he can't quite place, impatient _good_ or impatient _bad_ \-- before Gavin knocks away Riley's fork with his and it devolves into a scuffle of tines.

Nines is seated at his kitchen pass-through that night, just getting started with his wind-down glass of Primitivo, when the call comes. It's a number he doesn't recognize. Suspicious but willing to condone any telemarketer working at half past midnight, he answers.

"Hello?" he asks.

"Hey." Gavin's voice crackles in over the line. "I got your number from Tina. Is this a good time?"

"--For what?" Nines asks, in lieu of everything else confusing him at the moment.

"For me calling you," says Gavin, redundantly. Then adds, just as redundantly, "This is-- it's Gavin."

Nines is at a loss for words.

"Gavin Reed," says Gavin. "From the restaurant."

"No, I know who you are," says Nines, unsure of whether to laugh or not.

"Great, then say something that indicates that," demands Gavin. "Like _how are you, Chef,_ and then I can tell you to knock it off with the _Chef,_ we're not at work, how about that? Some classic conversation. My god."

"I know how you are," says Nines, "I saw you thirty minutes ago."

"Things can change," Gavin points out.

 _"Have_ things changed?" asks Nines.

"No," says Gavin, "but that's not the point."

To be honest, thus far, there has been no sign that the conversation has any point at all to speak of. In the unlit lull of his apartment, Nines sees his LED shimmer yellow off the brushed-steel exterior of his refrigerator.

"So," begins Nines, attempting to be conversational as requested, "everything is still well with you, I gather?"

"Stellar," says Gavin. "Successfully putting one foot in front of the other. Really nailing this whole walking thing."

"You're walking?" asks Nines, _not on the bus as he normally would be,_ then understands. He says it out loud before he decides whether he wants to. "--Oh, because-- you're headed to the Milton."

The barest pause, before Gavin answers. "No, I'm in my neighborhood," he says. "I just felt like walking home."

"My apologies," says Nines. "I didn't mean to make assumptions, I had thought that since the Milton is downtown and within walking distance--"

"It's fine," says Gavin, quickly. "I'm fucking exhausted, don't really feel like getting a drink anyway," as if he goes to the Milton for the drinks.

 _Why did you call me?_ the part of Nines that was built in search of answers wants to ask, but he knows that's the wrong move to make. What he has learned of the quandary of being human, wrought in tender miniature: that Gavin calling him with no clear aim in mind is a thing too precious to draw attention to, no sudden movements, a sparrow lit on your shoulder. _With every bared inch an invitation for disaster, you would want to ensconce yourself in the middle of a maze._

"I'm drinking, myself," says Nines. "A Primitivo."

"At this hour?" asks Gavin. "What, are you hosting an overnight barbecue party?"

"Not anymore," says Nines. "Now I have to send everyone home so that I can keep you company over the phone. Thank you for breaking up my soiree."

"Soiree, he says," scoffs Gavin. "Is it good at least? The wine?"

"Yes," says Nines. He takes another sip to confirm his judgment; he's still correct. "I'm enjoying it."

"You going to tell me about it or what?" asks Gavin. "Jesus, it's like pulling teeth with you, sometimes."

"I didn't-- all right," says Nines. "It's very fruit-forward, so much so that it almost seems sweet. Assertive blueberry pie and stewed plums, baking spices. Vanilla, nutmeg. Some of the tannins have aged out of it, so it's on the smoother side-- but with enough brightness to retain structure. Energetic. Were I human, I wouldn't touch something this vibrant in the middle of the night, but I have had the good fortune to have escaped that fate."

"That's different from the usual," says Gavin. "The Primitivo, I mean, because it sounds like easy drinking. You being a fucking smartass at the end there is very much the usual."

He's right on both counts. The Primitivo is bold if uncomplicated, forthright with its welcome. Its accessibility positions it at some remove from the puzzles Nines tends to prefer. But-- he's tired, too. Never mind the stockpile of his battery reserve or the unflagging synchronicity of his biocomponents. Bedraggled by the fear, the second-guessing, the torrential squalls of want.

"Not everything has to be a fight," says Nines. "Sometimes I just want-- something easy. Maybe I don't want to overthink it right now."

"Hm," says Gavin.

"What?" asks Nines, self-conscious.

"No, nothing," says Gavin. "I guess you're drinking a barbecue wine, and a barbecue is as easy as easy gets. Once summer comes back around, we should set up an outdoor grill in the alleyway. There's probably some city ordinance against it, but you'll figure it out."

"You told Chris we might close before Thanksgiving," says Nines, "but you want to plan events for next summer?"

"I'm feeling optimistic," says Gavin.

Nines is fairly certain that Gavin has never felt optimistic about anything in his entire life. All the same, there was the jitter in his knee over family meal; _like a kid the night before a field trip,_ said Tina. He doesn't sound as wired now as he did in the kitchen, but still, Nines hears the drumming as they talk, a running of fish, headed towards something important and inescapable.

_Why did you call me?_

"Pair the Primitivo for me," says Nines.

"I don't know, grill some meat," says Gavin. "Sounds like you could eat it with anything."

"I want to hear how you'd do it," insists Nines.

"Fine, okay," says Gavin. "Quizzing me at half past midnight. How about-- let's do skirt steak. If it's that fruity, it can probably take some acid, right? I'm thinking we give it a sear, glaze it with pomegranate molasses and black pepper. Quick and cheap, feeds a crowd, we'll make a block party of it."

Sweet in the coming, a tornado when it lands. Keeps you on your toes. The beckoning of all that fruit, blueberry and plum; but -- just as you pitch towards complacency, when you think you've figured it out -- the tart electric zip of the pomegranate molasses surprises you. Then one after the other: the lingering warmth of pepper, the simmer of alcohol. Be drunk before you know it. A love-tap of a pairing, leaving you reeling and asking for more, dizzyingly cruel to be kind.

"I like it," says Nines.

"Of course," says Gavin. "What's not to like?"

"Just have to make sure we're still open next year," says Nines. "There's a lot to get through, between now and then."

"Fall's not so bad," says Gavin. "I heard from Chris that he has some foraged morels coming in, which ought to be nice. Maybe we'll do a pasta, like a pappardelle with the morels and some short rib-- or nix the short rib if that's overdoing it."

"It sounds substantial," says Nines, "but that might be what you're going for."

"We'll figure it out," says Gavin. "Maddie was at Mezzaluna before, I bet she'll know what to do. That pancotto was great, huh? She's not loud about it, but she's definitely got some tricks up her sleeve."

"She does," says Nines. "Sous-chef Chen and I are also of the opinion that the best part of a tarte Tropezienne is the handful of crumbs left on the platter after everyone has had their share, so thank you very much for saving that for us."

"Snooze, lose," says Gavin.

"Now I know," says Nines.

"Right," says Gavin, and clears his throat. "Well, I see my building now, so-- that's me."

"--Sure," says Nines, a corner of him deflating, unsatisfied.

"Good walk," says Gavin, "I should do this from time to time." A beat, then: "See you, I guess."

"See you at work," says Nines.

It's not that he doesn't value the quiet intimacy of a phone call with no purpose, just Gavin's voice in his ear, the distant rumble of nighttime traffic under the sound of his breathing. Some part of Nines, still, must have been expecting something more-- one corner of the wallpaper peeling back, a glimpse of what's beneath.

But instead of hanging up, Gavin says: "Just out of curiosity--"

"Yes?" asks Nines.

"Do you still have that memory stored," asks Gavin, "from when you walked in on me?"

Nines sets his glass down, then picks it back up again. The door of the fridge blinks back at him, a haze of fire-truck red.

"--Chef," he says, "Gavin, if you want me to delete it, I can--"

"No," says Gavin. "Don't."

In an attempt to douse the rising heat in his throat, Nines takes a gulp of his wine.

"Play it when you're lonely," says Gavin.

The Primitivo promptly goes down the wrong set of pipes, which Nines has not even considered would be anatomically possible for him. Through the coughing fit that ensues, he hears Gavin laugh on the other end, low and private.

"Good night, Nines," says Gavin.

"--Good night," Nines manages to wheeze out, before the line goes dead.

With the wine glass rinsed and his breath barely caught, Nines leans back against the kitchen counter, swiping the back of his sleeve across his mouth. Heart breakneck, his airway damp, he closes his eyes.

Gavin, running nervous, on his way to something. Testing the ground beneath his feet; both of them too cautious, when it came to the crossing. Slow understanding burrows its way in, and seeded like an oyster, the nacre begins to gather around the pearl.

_I wish we--._

It snags, the way that pearls do. Nines brings his hand up to his chest, fingertips pressed into the fabric of his shirt. So scared of the sound of the ice coming apart, he wasn't listening to anything else. But maybe -- just maybe -- there is something here that lasts the winter, between them.

Gavin. _Make what made me chase you, and make what made me stay._ Nines arrived at Les Mignardises prickling with an itch that Connor called curiosity. Gavin was supposed to show him what it was like to go where he wasn't welcome, to live as a bundle of thorns, heedless of what he was made for. _Could you be someone they never planned on you being, and still be worth something?_ Nines wanted to learn how to be otherwise.

But Gavin never did anything exactly as he was supposed to, did he. Nines stayed at Les Mignardises because he found himself tangled up in skeins of care, held together with all the things you would have thought to discard. The brutality and dogmatism Nines was capable of, at times arrogant, at times self-righteous, his grip unforgiving, the way he pried, kept hunting for more, kept placing himself in Gavin's way, hungry for any chance to see him from closer up. Gavin took on all of it. Hid the bruises, ate the onigiri, opened his balconet door, and -- in his own impetuous way, as best as he knew how -- tried to look after his employees, even that. So Nines stayed.

 _Play it when you're lonely._ That wasn't really what Gavin called him to say, either, too unsteady still to find the precise words for it. He's on his way, same as Nines. But-- it's a kind of permission nonetheless, a tendril of something bewitching, slipping under Nines's collar. An impulse, torrid. _Someone I could want._

Someone he might be allowed to have. Before his eyes, just for him, Gavin undoes the lines he's drawn around them. Every blur of sand a _yes, if you wanted._ Nines exhales, his hand finding the waistband of his trousers, inching towards the growing weight between his legs. He remembers. Gavin's mouth, parted in a hot gasp as his head tipped back, the long muscles of his thigh drawing tight. Next to the bedside table with its scattered wrappers, his fingers fisted in the bedsheets. _Think of what he would sound like under you._

Is he home, a quarter to one, in his apartment just as barren as this one? Is he on his couch -- on his bed -- his pants rucked down like this? _Does he think about me like I think about him?_ Nines feels the slick run down his palm as he strokes himself, everything racing. Gavin braced against his own kitchen counter, halfway across town, hand around his own length, Nines's name in his mouth.

 _Think of what he would feel like around you._ The white-hot sheath of his body, alive--

Nines comes with a quiet bitten-off curse, a wet streak escaping between his fingers to drip onto his floor before he can grab the paper towels. The perspiration cools him almost too fast for it to be comfortable, and he's left struggling for air to fan what's inside him, head throbbing.

The first coherent thought he can formulate is imbued with equal parts outrage and gratitude: _Who put this sexuality subroutine here?_

The second is-- _just a few more days._ A few days to get his words in order, just a little coasting by, until he knows the right thing to say. Until everything's arranged to his satisfaction. They could go back to the bar, perhaps. Something nice. A moment of clarity, both of them on the same page for once, a glass of-- what is he meant to order for this?

_The first time we met, your foot hanging out of a dumpster, I promised you that I would leave you alone. I don't think I'm capable of keeping that promise. I never have been._

\--What wine tells a person that?

He's still mulling over the choice of wine late in service the next day, _something understated, compelling but dignified,_ as he returns to the host stand. Gavin barely made it back in time for opening from a meeting with a supplier, Nines has been front of house the whole day, and all he has seen of Gavin so far is his jacket sleeve through the part of the divider curtain. _Just a few more days,_ Nines tells himself. _Today, we're getting by._

One of their business cards has fallen off its rack, coming to rest halfway beneath the host stand. Nines bends down to retrieve it. The front door swings open as he begins to straighten back up.

"Reservation for two under Woodward," says a familiar voice. "Hello, Nines."

Nines sees them.

"Connor," he says. "Hank."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Who put this sexuality subroutine here?" demands Nines. Somewhere across town, Elijah Kamski sneezes.


	8. Salades

## XXII.

It doesn't matter what he does. Nines hangs back by the divider curtain, trying to get an urgent word with every server before they head towards the kitchen, but he knows it's really just a matter of time. _Fatima, please don't tell Chef Reed that Hank Anderson is here. Colin, please don't tell Chef Reed that Hank Anderson is here. Clementine, please don't tell Chef Reed that Hank Anderson is here._ He talks to all the servers, but that won't do a thing, water through a sieve.

He can't even fully explain to himself why he's trying to keep Gavin from finding out -- what does he think is going to happen? -- but that he knows _something_ will take place, something loud and unpleasant and barbed around the edges, and he needs it to be a quiet night. _Just a few days of peace._ He hasn't even figured out what wine to order yet.

"Will you want to see the kitchen afterwards?" he asks Hank and Connor, as he brings them their grissini.

"See Gavin, you mean," says Hank, wryly.

"I expect he will be in the kitchen, yes," says Nines.

Connor takes a single grissino and bites into it, very carefully, testing the snap. Nines can pinpoint the exact moment that he deems Ben Collins worthy of rivalry in the baked goods arena.

"Let me take the meal to think about it," says Hank. It's evident that he's hedging because he's trying to gauge how Connor feels about the meet-and-greet, though if Nines knows Connor, he wouldn't have come unless he was already prepared for its possibility.

 _I'm the one that's not prepared,_ thinks Nines. But when he turns the table over for Colin to apprise them of the specials, Hank and Connor wind like vines around a garden archway, tilting towards each other over the silverware. Nines recognizes this sensation, the space between himself and the two of them dilating to an unmanageable distance. Seen through the wrong end of a telescope, Hank and Connor make up a family, wrapped up and finished in ribbon. Any plea he might have had forming in his throat -- _come back in a week's time, please, don't go into the kitchen today_ \-- dies away at the sight of them. What right does he have to make demands? He was never their responsibility.

Surely, that's why Hank is here at all: to talk to Gavin. To confront something he decided he didn't want to dodge any longer. _Hasn't it been long enough,_ Hank might have reasoned to himself, straightening his jacket as they headed out the door. Maybe an underestimation of how stubborn scar tissue can be, but all Nines can do is pray to be proven wrong.

Despite his better judgment, he gets his hopes up. Hank and Connor methodically eat their way through most of the menu, and service is coming to a blissful close by the time they arrive at dessert without incident. Nines sees the other patrons out, table by table, _thank you for dining with us tonight. Have a pleasant evening, see you again._ Every moment he's not at the host stand, Nines has been hovering near the Anderson quadrant of the dining room, catching himself more than once as he almost asks them not to do the only thing they came here for. He clenches his hands closed until his nails bite crescent moons into his palms.

"How has everything been tonight?" he asks them, and receives a pair of thoughtful nods in return.

"You run the ship well, Nines," says Connor.

"The food's not what you'd expect from him," says Hank, "but it's-- well-executed."

Damning with faint praise, that review. For a second, Nines wonders: _Is it a good thing, this hint of disappointment? Will they come back after he finds his footing?_ It's the best-case scenario, all things considered. If they finish their meal and take their leave, if they can retreat to the Saint Bernard and throw blankets waiting at home for them, if only they would give him this, then maybe--

Then he sees Colin approach the table, holding a 12-quart Cambro container in his hands. It's filled to the brim with something frothy.

"Colin," says Nines, "what is--"

"I'm sorry," Colin says to him. "I think he saw the VIP mark on the ticket and took a look for himself."

\-- _Of course._ Nines should have expected it. He should have known better than to think that he could place a hermetic seal between this room and the next, between himself and catastrophe, when any one of a million things could go wrong. Calculation was only that; try as he might, it never assured anything.

"What's that?" asks Hank.

Colin sets the Cambro container onto the center of their tablecloth, chagrined at what he has been tasked with doing. "It's, uh-- compliments of the chef," he says. "This dish is called -- I'm sorry -- _If You Love Seafood Foam So Much, Why Don't You Marry It, You Decrepit Fuck._ Actually that's not-- exactly what he called it, but I can't repeat--"

"Seafood f--" Hank stares up at Colin. "Is this 12 fucking quarts of scallop espuma?"

"Excuse me," says Nines, and rushes to the kitchen.

In place of the usual frenetic bustle that would greet him at the divider curtain, he hears only the hollow clang of a utensil against a prep bowl, the vast and deafening lack of the commotion he's grown to love. Then, as he comes to the pass, Gavin's voice: _"What's the opposite of soigne?"_

"Gavin," Tina is saying, sharp, "don't be a fucking asshole!"

"Whatever it is, I want that," snaps Gavin. "Just-- fuck it up."

"I'm not going to stay for this," says Tina. "I'm out."

She undoes her apron and balls it up in her hands, flinging it onto the vacant corner of a prep station. _"Get a grip,"_ she tells Gavin as she storms out into the corridor, brushing past Nines without a word, upset as he's never seen her.

 _"Fine,"_ Gavin yells after her, still furiously beating something with a whisk. The clatter of metal on metal, an ugly crescendo. "It's not your problem, anyway!" Then, generally at the rest of the kitchen crew, porters and all: "It's not your fucking problem either, so-- quit fucking-- just fuck off, okay? Get the _fuck out."_

Hesitantly, Maddie and Ben reach for their apron strings.

"Chef," begins Nines.

Gavin turns towards him, and even halfway across the span of the kitchen, Nines can feel him shaking. The look on his face is so openly wounded that Nines falters, the breath knocked from him.

 _"You,"_ says Gavin. "You weren't going to tell me."

"I'm sorry," says Nines, "I--"

"What," asks Gavin, "you thought I wouldn't find out?"

The crew hurriedly files out of the kitchen, leaving all their stations in medias res, haphazard remnants of their work strewn everywhere. Suds in the sink, Maddie's knife roll askew. Ben's shaker of powdered sugar lies abandoned on its side, rocking in place.

"I'm sorry," says Nines, again.

"You were supposed to be--" starts Gavin, and doesn't seem to know how the sentence ends. He drops the whisk into the bowl, disgusted, shoving it away hard enough for it to crash against the backsplash. Whatever was inside splatters across the tiles, pallid.

"Gavin," says Nines, "I was only trying--"

_\-- to give myself a fighting chance, all the ghosts you still can't let go of --_

"--to help," he finishes.

"This _isn't how you help,"_ counters Gavin, hands rigid around the edge of the prep station. "I don't-- what the fuck did you think I was going to do, Nines? How did you think I was going to fuck up?"

_That's not why I did it. I never thought that about you._

"Jesus," comes a voice from behind Nines. "Lay off him."

Hank ambles into the kitchen, scratching at the back of his head. Connor, in tow, stops just outside the threshold, next to Nines.

Gavin, his expression gone hard and vacant as a death mask, slowly straightens.

"Why do you always insist on being this unsocialized?" continues Hank. "You got a bone to pick with me, leave Nines out of it. He didn't do anything wrong."

"Hello, Chef," says Connor.

Nines feels a weight settle atop his chest, the suffocation of too much history, an anvil. Like a man condemned to death by drowning, anchor lashed to his ankles, crushed silent, he sees the room recede from him like a mirage of the shallows.

"--What do you want," Gavin asks, through gritted teeth.

"I can't come eat at a restaurant without getting interrogated?" asks Hank. "Isn't this the industry professional thing to do, grab a bite, drop by the back to say hello? So here I am, saying hello."

 _"Now_ you show up?" asks Gavin.

Caught off balance by the candor of unguarded distress pouring off of Gavin, Hank's affectation of incredulity slips, just for a moment. "I know," he says, begrudgingly. "I'm late."

It's almost a concession, if not an apology. It only seems to incense Gavin even further.

"And you just walk in here like-- like that's enough?" he asks, gesturing to the whole of the kitchen. "What, and suddenly everything's fine? It's all done?"

"Will you cut me a fucking break," grouses Hank. "I came here to make a goddamn effort. We didn't exactly part on the best of terms, if you'll recall. You know people think we stabbed each other to death? I'm trying to do something by being here."

"So that's it, I'm supposed to forgive you?" demands Gavin.

 _"Forgive_ me?" repeats Hank, agape. Then, again, the mere notion of it outlandish to him: _"You,_ forgive _me?"_

Nines, sinking, hears a muted rapping from far above near the surface of the water.

"Oh, my mistake, it was me that fucked up," snarls Gavin. "I forgot that it was my fault you fucking _sacked_ me for, what, not licking your boots hard enough? Because I didn't get off on being your doormat like that son of a bitch over there?"

He jerks a thumb at Connor, who -- in turn -- appears absolutely unperturbed.

"Are you fucking serious?" asks Hank, throwing up his hands. "Do you not know why I fired you?"

"If you needed an open mouth for every time your dick--" begins Gavin.

"You don't think I _knew you were using?"_ shouts Hank. "You don't think _everyone_ there knew? So why doesn't anyone talk about _that_ instead of this bullshit about some ridiculous fucking knife fight, you fucking moron, did you ever think about who kept them quiet? What the _fuck,_ an open-- seriously, _what the fuck?"_

Rap-rap-rap, a woodpecker call.

"So what if I was?" yells Gavin. "I worked my hours, I kept the place running, what business was it of yours what I did on my own time?"

"Of _course_ it was my business," yells Hank. "It was my restaurant, and you were my sous-chef!"

"Could have fooled me," Gavin shouts back, "just seemed like I was warming the station until you got a sous that you gave a shit about!"

 _"Gavin,"_ says Hank, _"I had to stop you from killing Connor."_

His LED a placid, steady blue, Connor looks for all the world like a distantly interested spectator of the proceedings, as though it's someone else's murder they're talking about. Then: with a quick flick of his hand like he's brushing back his hair, he taps his temple where Nines can see it. Rap-rap-rap.

The comlink.

 _\--Connor?_ asks Nines.

 _There we go,_ says Connor. _I've been knocking for a while._

"Bullshit," Gavin is saying, "I didn't do anything--"

"Because I didn't fucking _let_ you do anything!" shouts Hank. "I was watching, you dumb shit! Are you really going to tell me that in complete fucking honesty, the thought never crossed your mind? The last week, you didn't come so close to it, _multiple_ times, that all it would have taken was an unattended knife in the wrong place at the wrong time?"

Gavin says nothing, which is answer enough.

"If I hadn't stopped you from coming in to work that last day--" Hank shakes his head. "God, you were iced off your fucking mind, and you _hated_ him so fucking much, I knew if you went in there--"

"Well," Connor says to Gavin, conversationally, "let's face it, you probably _couldn't_ have done anything."

"You _fucking--"_ starts Gavin, eyes narrowing.

 _"Don't,"_ Hank cuts in, a warning bark like a thunderclap. "You don't even know how bad it was for you, Jesus fucking Christ, don't you get it? I didn't fire you to punish you, I fired you so that you could get your shit together!"

Rap-rap-rap, again:

 _I keep losing you,_ says Connor.

 _Sorry, I--_ says Nines. _Is it true? Did he really try to--_

 _It's hard to conclude beyond reasonable doubt what he would have done,_ says Connor. _I think he might have been capable of it then, yes. But who knows, it was so long ago -- I was only staging there as an apprentice -- Nines, listen._

 _\--Yes?_ asks Nines.

 _The Gavin you know,_ says Connor. _Do you think he would do anything like that now?_

 _No,_ says Nines, with absolute certitude. _I know he wouldn't._ The inward curl of Gavin's anger now, some of the old roughness filed away from him, a jagged rock worn down after years of tumbling along the riverbed.

 _Good,_ says Connor. _Don't forget that._

 _That he wouldn't?_ asks Nines.

 _That you know him,_ says Connor. LED serene, he keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead, unflinching even as Gavin slams his fist onto the station, making the mise en place jump. _What I learned from butchery,_ says Connor, _is that what needs to happen doesn't always look pretty. Maybe that's why I prefer to bake._

"Even then, still, I tried to keep you on," says Hank. "You don't think I fought for you? You don't know _how hard_ I fought for you."

"Not hard enough," says Gavin, raw with hurt.

"Every goddamn thing I could do, I did for you!" Hank's turn, this time, to gesture to the kitchen around them. "This? Just a couple years after no one in Detroit would even look at your resume, suddenly Fowler turns up out of the blue and offers you a head chef position? Who the fuck do you think told him about you?"

All of it is news to Nines, but this, evidently, is news to Gavin as well; he flinches and goes still for a second, eyes wide. Nines sees that what comes over him is a surge of shame -- the indictment, _you never earned any of this_ \-- though Hank only meant to compel acknowledgement with it. At the most, gratitude.

 _But Gavin, why does it matter,_ Nines would say, _when he's not the reason that you're still here?_ What Fowler does to keep Gavin, screaming matches every week, _I know I didn't make a mistake,_ that's not just a favor you do for an old friend. That's faith in the invisible, _that's him having put his trust in you. That's why you're still here, it's not because of Hank_ \-- Nines would say -- but for the fathoms of water between him and the room, this sweeping isolation, left a voiceless shipwreck on the ocean floor.

"And what do I get in return?" asks Hank. "You screaming at me in the kitchen that I put you in?"

"Fuck you, go buy yourself a thank-you card," says Gavin, tucking the injury away, fuel for the fire. "Like you did it for any other reason than to hold it over me! Did you think you were giving me something I wanted?"

"What the fuck are you talking about?" demands Hank. "This is your fucking restaurant, you're head chef! Why the fuck wouldn't you want that, all you would have been otherwise is my sous--"

Nines sees it happen; as the words leave his mouth, Hank understands. It didn't matter, really, the exact species of the need that had kept Gavin tethered to Hank. Whatever kind of desire it was. In the end it was all the same: Gavin breathless at his heels, an unhealed cut begging to be touched, thirsty for the things that Hank couldn't give him. Everything Gavin has here -- the magazine spreads, a head chef's salary, the run of the kitchen -- just a distant second choice to lingering at his side.

 _Everything he has here -- me,_ thinks Nines -- _just a distant second choice to--_

"Gavin," begins Hank.

 _"No,_ don't you _fucking dare,"_ Gavin shouts over him, furious at having been so transparent. "You don't get to throw me out and then pat yourself on the back for feeling bad about it, you-- god, just-- so fucking full of this hypocrite bullshit, I don't know how you even-- _fuck you,_ Anderson, fuck you and your toy poodle sous-chef and your whole prissy fucking edible flower arrangement menu, take your shitty fucking micro chervil and plant it up your--"

"Chef Reed," interrupts Connor, "you know what your problem is?"

 _"--Excuse me?"_ Gavin whirls on him. "What the _fuck_ did you say?"

"You think," says Connor, his temple lit searingly blue, "you're the only person in the world who has ever had anything go wrong for them."

"Of all the fucking-- I don't need this from _you,"_ spits Gavin. "What the hell do you know about it? Everything you ever did--"

"Please," says Connor. "Do you really think you were the only person to antagonize me? Do you think you were even the first? _Let's blame the android for what I don't have and what I can't do,_ like that's a brilliant original thought?"

"Connor," says Hank, uncertain.

"A moment, Hank," says Connor, holding up his hand with such stern efficiency that Hank complies. "Somehow, Gavin, you got it into your head that just because something hurts for you, that gives you the license to be cruel to the people around you. As if anything comes easy to _anyone."_

Gavin is so bewildered with indignation that he just gapes, speechless, as though a tree has personally waylaid him on his morning commute to reprimand him for his shortcomings.

"All you know how to do is lash out," continues Connor, "even when those people need you the most."

Nines has been stalled at the roadblock of the _distant second choice,_ wrestling still with the broken-record question, _if all of this is just a consolation prize, if then,_ but this rebuke from Connor jolts him into wakefulness for an instant. Because _that's not really true,_ thinks Nines.

He knows it's not true. _I stayed for a reason._ Gavin understood, when Nines barely could himself, the estrangement of being made for something he didn't want. The unbearable claustrophobia of finding yourself in the wrong skin. Bruises around his wrist, Gavin rolled down his sleeves and never said a thing. Bite by patient bite, finished eating the worst onigiri in all of Michigan. Beckoned him to the open balconet, _I wish we--,_ and didn't have a clue how to turn away anyone at his door. The ginger tom, _happy birthday, I think,_ so hopelessly clumsy but always, for as long as Nines has known him, someone who tried his best to make room for anyone who needed him.

 _Connor._ Nines pounds at the gate to their comlink. _Connor, that's wrong._

 _Really,_ says Connor. He sounds thrilled to be contradicted.

 _Maybe that's the Gavin you knew,_ says Nines, _but I know him now, and what I know of him is something different. What happened then was unfair, you shouldn't have had to fight just to be where you were, but if you could see--_

 _No,_ says Connor. _Don't tell me._

 _What?_ asks Nines.

 _Say it out loud,_ Connor tells him, and the shutters of the comlink come crashing closed between them. Like withdrawing from an alligator's bite, Nines snatches himself back bodily, jerking in place as the severed connection ejects him.

"--isn't," Nines blurts out, a voiced fragment at the tail end of his protestation.

Everyone turns towards him. Connor waits.

"Gavin isn't," Nines tries again, "like that."

Even if all this is a distant second choice -- _even if I'm only what's left over after the loss --_ that doesn't change the fact that Gavin is as Nines knows him. _And I do know him,_ thinks Nines. _Even in the ways that I don't have words for yet, I know him._

"I've had ample opportunity to observe his conduct during my employment here," says Nines, his stride coming to him slowly. "Gavin has the troubling tendency to react to setbacks with hostility rather than diplomacy. His instincts for plating leave something to be desired. He is simultaneously anxious about relinquishing control yet disinclined to assume responsibility. Under no circumstances should he be permitted to review wine, as the resulting assessment will be neither informative nor coherent. I am less than enthused about some of his social acquaintances, though I confess that I cannot vouch for my impartiality in the matter. I believe it is not outside the realm of possibility that I will walk into the back office one day and find that he and Jeffrey Fowler have perished in a double homicide."

Gavin somehow manages to look even more stunned than he did when Connor began to castigate him, as though a second tree has just sprinted across the street to join the first one. Even Hank is staring like he's never heard Nines speak before; only Connor, head tilted expectantly, remains wholly unruffled.

"And he covered for me," says Nines, "when he had every reason not to. Frankly, he covered for far too many people for far longer than was even advisable. These were incredibly imprudent operating decisions, and all of them were mistakes. But," he says -- and looks at Gavin as he does -- "every last one of these mistakes, he made because he knew when he was needed. Because he knew just how badly he was needed."

When Nines meets Gavin's eyes, he can tell that Gavin -- in spite of every impulse in him that makes him want to run -- forces himself to hold the gaze. His mouth drawn tight, eyebrows knitted together like it physically pains him, still, Gavin doesn't look away.

Before, something like this might have been a summons for the fear. The danger of losing, of moving too suddenly. His touch too grasping. But what Nines feels trickling into his limbs now isn't the terror anymore, nor even the scorching desolation of want.

"What you're describing, Connor, is perhaps a Gavin that you knew once," says Nines. "I trust you knew him well, certainly much better than I ever will. That's a story I have no part in. But if you think that's who he is now -- if that Gavin is still who you're talking to -- you're wrong about that. I've been here with him, when you haven't been."

This feeling he can't name: not the violence he was made for, and not the curiosity he came for, either. It's a faint glint of summer sun on brass, glimpsed from across a field. Something insolent.

 _"This_ Gavin," says Nines. "I know him."

Outside, the faraway keen of an ambulance marks the night. Connor looks so thoroughly pleased -- _how much of this did he goad me into?_ \-- and because there is a first time for everything, Nines briefly thinks that he wouldn't mind if something that resembled a gentle wayward punch found its way to Connor's beaming face. Hank's long exhale, the wind through an abandoned mansion.

Gavin is struggling, much too obviously, to keep himself from crumpling into a mound of ash like a leaf in a bonfire. He's going to draw blood from his lip if he bites down any harder. But in all of it, some unseen lid over the kitchen jostles loose, and a bit of the strain built up thick around them whistles out to leave the room a little lighter than before. In the brittle set of Gavin's jaw is the same question he asked at the wine bar -- his uncertainty like a reproach, _why_ \-- and in Nines's fingertips, the itch builds. _I don't know why I'm standing over here,_ he realizes with a start, _on the wrong side of the kitchen._

"When--" begins Hank.

He almost seems to change his mind, trailing off into a disgruntled silence; but then he presses on.

"When Cole--" he says.

Gavin freezes up.

"Do you know how fucking terrified I was?" asks Hank. "Everything was just-- I couldn't hold onto a single goddamn thing. _Cole,_ Gavin. I could barely drag myself out of my fucking bed in the morning, but I tried my damnest to get through to you. Because if I couldn't keep you in one piece, then-- and if I couldn't keep Connor safe from _you--_ I couldn't keep _losing,_ do you understand? I was so tired of waking up just to count down to the next fucking funeral."

"That was," says Gavin. "I didn't mean to be-- like that, then."

"You weren't yourself," says Hank, "and neither was I. That's what I'm trying to say. I didn't have room for you, and you didn't have room for me. I had to get you out of there. I wish I'd done it better, but that was the only way I could think to do it. Something was going to happen, otherwise."

"--Yeah," says Gavin.

"We couldn't keep that up," says Hank.

Gavin drops his stare to the floor, the rubber mat at his feet sprawling crooked, angled unevenly to the grout. Arms crossed over his chest, he kicks it morosely in place until it realigns. When he looks back up -- a flash, just an instant -- his eyes dart towards Nines first.

"I just wish I didn't get so hung up on it," he says, his voice only a scratch. "With this-- shitty fucking menu. I'm making your menu, how fucking sad is that? Jesus. I started off on the wrong foot. Should have -- I don't know -- told Fowler to wait when he called, so I could take time to figure things out first. Go find myself, or-- some shit."

"Find yourself?" echoes Hank. "You don't--"

 _"Right, you big fucking babies,"_ someone bellows from the corridor. _"Let's wrap it up."_

Everyone, including Connor, jumps. It's Tina, standing at the top of a stepladder, one hand raised high over her head.

"Tina?" asks Gavin, craning his neck to make her out through the window of the pass. "Tina, what the _fuck?"_

"Seems like the show's over, so hug it out," she yells. "Or I will _flood this place."_

She flicks up a flame with the lighter in her hand -- _"Tina Chen, what the actual fuck, are you holding a lighter?"_ \-- and gives it a threatening wave under the fire sprinkler head.

"Come on, we don't have all day!" she shouts. _"Hug it out."_

"Is this how things are done here?" asks Hank, flabbergasted.

"Don't look at me!" exclaims Gavin. "She's out of control!"

"Hank, Gavin," says Connor, "please listen to this very dangerous person. She has a weapon and I think you should acquiesce to her demands."

"--I hate this," grumbles Hank. "I shouldn't have come here today."

"Why are you _relenting?"_ demands Gavin, hackles up. "What are you doing?"

"I'm de-escalating a hostage situation," says Hank, and stomps across the room. When he grabs Gavin up in what is less a hug and more a smothering by tweed, Gavin's arms fall despondently at his sides, like a candle with its fight snuffed out.

"Ugh," says Gavin. "Fuck."

"Now both of you apologize," Tina calls, her hands cupped into a bullhorn.

Hank and Gavin splutter in unison, an indistinct chorus of _Tina_ and _listen here_ and _come the fuck on._

"To _me,"_ continues Tina. "Apologize to me. I had to borrow a stepladder! At this hour! I had to go buy a lighter, I don't even smoke! Rachel is all alone at home and here I am, trying to break up a pity party, not even getting thanked for it. Apologize!"

"Please obey this maniac," says Connor.

"Okay," mutters Gavin, "sorry."

"Sorry," says Hank.

"You're all so much work," says Tina, and clambers off the stepladder. "Hi, I'm Tina Chen. I'm sous-chef here at Les Mignardises."

"Connor, sous-chef at The 313," says Connor. "Good to meet you."

Hank lets Gavin shove him away, and wanders back to the pass to join the rest of the group. "You know," he says, over his shoulder, "you don't always get to _find_ yourself."

He stuffs his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels.

"Rebuilding is a luxury," he goes on. "Sometimes you're left with nothing at all, not even pieces of rubble to rummage through. Sometimes every fucking thing is taken away from you. Where the fuck would you dig to find yourself then? You have to _decide,_ you dumb shit. You don't uncover some-- fully-formed statue of yourself in the desert."

Gavin rubs his hand across the bridge of his nose, the skin below his eyes so thin that it smudges to purple under the fluorescent overheads. His shoulders are sharp in his coat.

 _Why am I standing over here?_ thinks Nines. _Shouldn't I--_

"Okay," says Tina, and claps her hands together. "Gavin, what do you need?"

"I'd like to clean the kitchen," says Gavin.

"We're going to let Gavin clean the kitchen," says Tina, tucking the stepladder under her arm. "Come on, everybody."

"--Gavin," calls Connor, as they start to shuffle out. "Before I started staging at The 313, a lot of people told me that I should apply to sushi restaurants instead. Android chef, cold hands, precise, built for sushi work. Everyone said it was a good fit."

"Should have put you up in Novi," says Gavin.

"But I didn't want to be a sushi chef, so I didn't," says Connor. "Besides, if we all only did what other people told us to do, all you could ever do is go fuck yourself."

"Fuck you too," mutters Gavin. "Go home."

Still, as Connor moves towards the divider curtain, Nines can tell that the smile he wears is an honest one, free of any malice. He's in such a state of merriment that he looks around and winks at Nines as he continues walking backwards, which is an action that Nines can't even begin trying to parse.

His back to the pass, Gavin tugs his side towel from the waist of his apron and reaches for the backsplash. A slow swipe of cotton, one tile rubbed clean, then the next. He bends down to pick up a forgotten espuma gun from under the counters. Nines drags his feet, but Gavin doesn't turn to stop him.

 _That's all right,_ Nines tells himself. _There are things I can do for him, and there are-- things like these. It's all right._ And even if Gavin is only here because he can't be at The 313, still, _I'm glad to have said what I said. I meant it._

"Long day," Tina is saying, when Nines closes the front door behind him. "I'm going to go see if I can return this lighter, wish me luck. Bye, Nines. Good night, everyone, and you're welcome."

"Thank you," says Hank, "I think."

"I'll head off as well," Nines tells Hank and Connor. "See you for dinner sometime soon."

"No," says Connor. "You're coming with us, Nines."

"Why?" asks Nines.

"Because we have Evan Williams," says Hank, "and you need something stronger than wine."

  
  


## XXIII.

Not that any of it gets him drunk, per se -- android metabolic homeostasis being what is -- but the three of them hunch over Hank's kitchen table with their three glasses of Evan Williams, and Nines agrees that it does something wine can't. The strength of the whiskey overwhelms all his modules for sensory perception, especially taken neat, and everything careens a bit as he sips at it.

"Like getting slapped on the tongue," says Connor.

It also has the curious effect of streamlining his mental operations, pruning away the digressions and hypotheticals that threaten to gum up the topiary of his thoughts, leaving in place an easier shape to read. In truth, it's overdue; he hasn't processed much of anything since Hank and Connor walked into the restaurant. Suspended with leagues of water on every side of him, each year he missed another ballast, dragging him down towards oblivion.

There was a moment -- insolent, the summer sun on brass -- that took him by the shoulders and angled him towards clarity. An unfamiliar audacity, all too brief. When Nines told Gavin, _I know you,_ and Gavin refused to look away-- something so desperately brave about his struggle that Nines was proud of him, like a rosebush he had watered and tended to-- that feeling. _What was that?_

"So," says Connor, "are his wine reviews really that bad?"

Connor, ever the deft go-between. He has been making just enough conversation to keep Nines focused, keep him thinking through what he needs to without miring himself down. Pruning him close, like whiskey.

"Yes," says Nines. "They're terrible. I ordered him a Greco Bianco and he told a convoluted story about a shag carpet."

"Are you worried about him?" asks Connor.

Hank looks up from his glass.

"With regard to this, today," says Nines, "I think-- he'll be all right. As you said, a reckoning was in the works."

"It was probably never going to be pleasant," says Hank. "Maybe it went as well as it could have."

"What worries me is that he's not where he wants to be," says Nines. When he swallows, a flare of witch hazel dies down to oak in his throat. "That as long as he's at Les Mignardises, he doesn't have what he wants. I don't-- enjoy thinking about that."

"Do you really think that's the case?" asks Connor, eyebrows raised.

"Didn't he say as much himself?" asks Nines. "That he'd rather be sous-chef at The 313 than anything else?"

"Well, let's think about it this way," says Connor, tipping his glass to watch the whiskey legs cling to the walls. "If the Gavin that you know isn't the Gavin that had it out for me, then he isn't the Gavin that wanted to sous at The 313, either. If one's water under the bridge, the other one is, too."

But is it as easy as that, water under the bridge? If the change that moves a person is such a thorough thing, wiping a slate clean, no trace of the past in their bones-- what holds them together, in the end? Surely there's no clean break to be made. _Don't you always carry it with you, what mattered enough to have formed you?_ The way that something in Gavin cracked apart and recoiled from the open air, when he saw Hank in the kitchen. _I don't think you leave that behind._

And if in five years' time, _if he's somewhere else, or if I'm somewhere else,_ the thought that all this might have been a season and a half to fold away -- nothing but a bygone, a sweater that kept you warm but might never wear again -- _then what is it for, if we're just eddies, waiting for pebbles to break against?_

Hank and Connor are engrossed in an animated sidebar: Connor insisting, _But if he did, Hank, just as a hypothetical,_ and Hank, appalled, _Absolutely not, I have zero desire to speculate on the various methods that Gavin could have used to murder you._ Hank resolutely buries his chin in his rocks glass as Connor says something about a deep fryer.

So is this the same Hank that Connor deviated for, then? Is this the Hank that sat at this kitchen table with the revolver chamber spinning, the Hank that walked home from the funeral of his child, feeling with every step the fraying of the tether that held him here? The Hank that looked at Gavin, at Connor, and knew that they wouldn't come out on the other side without someone getting hurt. Was it water under the bridge, the fear that had driven Connor, his hand around the muzzle of a gun?

"I gotta take a leak," says Hank, leveraging himself upright. "Talk amongst yourselves." Beneath the table, Sumo lifts his shaggy jaw an inch off his forepaws to watch Hank shuffle away, then lulls himself back to serenity at the pat of Connor's hand against his crown.

 _Connor,_ says Nines. _Can I ask something about Hank?_

 _I'd love to talk behind his back,_ says Connor.

 _Or maybe it's something about you,_ says Nines. _I'm not sure. It has to do with your deviation._

 _I see,_ says Connor.

 _Do you think that --_ even through the comlink, Nines searches a library of imperfections for the words he means -- _Hank is still the same person that he was that night? If it's all water under the bridge, then what still makes you important to him? Is it that you're the one who-- fixed him?_

Connor, when he dispenses with the veneer of geniality that rounds off his acumen, could unsettle someone not prepared to be peered into. Not unkind, but too incisive for comfort. Nines is as used to it as anyone can be, but his ramparts fly up nonetheless at the look Connor turns on him, an immune response to scrutiny.

 _I didn't fix him,_ says Connor.

 _Is that the wrong word?_ asks Nines.

 _It's the wrong idea,_ says Connor. _I've felt it, you know. Like a tingle that starts in my fingers. Someone we care about needs something, and we think, to need is to lack-- and to lack is to be incomplete, to be broken. Let me fix it._

Like something coming loose inside the river of his skin.

 _But lack is what broke us and brought us here, too,_ says Connor. _We wanted something badly enough to shatter ourselves. Maybe all this talk of breaking was never the right way to put it, if it makes us think of ourselves as pieces that can be put back together. It's not breaking, what happens to us; and it's not what happens to humans either. It's more like-- going on, bearing the imprints of the things that touched us. Shaped a little differently, each time we collide against something._

 _Even when the collision is something we never wanted?_ asks Nines.

 _Even then,_ says Connor. _Even when you'd trade anything to undo it. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the suffering makes anyone better for it; that's not what the impact is about. But it changes you. When it does, the question is-- can you look at yourself and understand, this is the shape you take now?_

If the Hank that sits here, whiskey in hand, is everything that has ever happened to him--

 _I never needed to fix him, Nines,_ says Connor. _I just had to remind him that he doesn't break._

And if all the water under the bridge is the same water still, the debris it holds to its chest, the currents that carve its banks -- then to be the most _yourself_ in the now, to know yourself as changed from your past, isn't to cast off the things that formed you.

 _\--You leave none of it behind,_ thinks Nines.

Over a casserole dish of table scraps, he remembers the promise: _When I can put this together, I will understand something very important about him._ Nines sees it now. The carabineros, the family meal, the coupe platter at Zabuton. Shells, trimmings, bones, _what if none of this was wrong?_ What if the wastage on the edges of your dish was never wastage at all, but part of what made the dish _yours?_

_What if you left none of yourself behind?_

If you had to accept that all of yourself was _you --_ the parts of yourself you hated the most, the things that cut you the deepest, everyone who has ever marked you, for pleasure or for pain -- if you held all of it together, and recognized it as the shape you take now. Then _Gavin, there's nothing in you I need to unmake or remake. You, as you are. I just have to remind you that you don't break._

At the river, Gavin poured the rubble of the onigiri into his hands, finished every last regrettable bite. _Of course I have to eat it,_ he said. _This is the worst thing you've ever done._ Maybe that wasn't a taunt either, the way that he meant it. Gavin didn't know how to understand anything without seeing its underside, where the seams came together, inelegant and strained. Never liked anything until he knew it chafed against itself. _Couldn't figure out who I was before seeing the clumsiest parts of me, the things I'd thought to discard._

"I think," Nines says to Connor, "I understand why Gavin dislikes you."

"Nines," exclaimes Connor. "That's so hurtful! Hank, isn't that hurtful?"

Hank returns to his seat with a creak of wood, and leans his head on one hand. "I'm sure Nines means well," he says, unconcerned.

Everything seemed to come so easily to Connor. The precision, the congeniality, the tact -- Hank's affection -- no underside to speak of. Sure, Gavin knew nothing about the ways that Connor has had to fight, tooth and nail. Nothing about Hank's revolver at the kitchen table, either. But even Nines has thought it about Connor from time to time; without quite as much rancor, but thought it, all the same. How easily a family comes to Connor, wrapped up and finished in ribbon. The things that deviation allowed him, when it all it did was nail Nines's feet to the floor. Hank and Connor, winding like vines around a garden archway, tilting towards each other over the silverware.

"Maybe he doesn't know you well enough," says Nines. "Maybe I don't either, as well as I should."

"It's not easy, knowing someone," says Connor. "I don't like that he dislikes me, but I suppose I understand it. Well, actually-- I don't even know that he dislikes me anymore, at least in the way that he did. It felt different, somehow."

"Like when you move back into your parents' house," says Hank. "You become who you were, for a bit, but you always know it's not the same. The shoes don't fit like they used to."

 _So how do I tell him what I know now?_ That it was the same silver tune, always, beneath the clamor of a thousand pots and pans. The maw of a four-pound salmon head; coat sleeves rolled down over his wrists; all the ghosts he can't seem to let go of, _that you don't have to try to let go of, Gavin._ His cooking was the skeleton key. _Everything you try to scrub raw from your skin, everyone you can't seem to cut away from yourself-- that, too, is what you're made of._

"How do you move out of your parents' house?" asks Nines.

"How do you-- what?" asks Hank.

"If that's not who someone is," says Nines, "if they're someone else now, but they've forgotten it-- how would you help them remember? How do they start gathering up all of themselves?"

Hank and Connor glance at each other.

"Shouldn't be too hard for Gavin," says Connor. "He has you, doesn't he?"

The whiskey in Nines's glass catches the light and turns to a flash of molten bronze. _I'm the one that makes him who he is now._ That insolent feeling: It floods him in full this time, a headlong beast, a feral and unflinching triumph. Gavin telling himself not to look away as Nines builds him, word by word. Placing himself in Nines's hands, willingly marked, letting the collision shape him. _So what if we're the dregs?_ If sometimes Gavin thinks about The 313, if sometimes he dreams of being somewhere else, what of it? _We have him now._

 _I have him now,_ thinks Nines. _I don't care about the rest of it._

"Connor," whispers Hank, "is that what Nines looks like when he smiles?"

"Evidently so," Connor whispers back.

"The truth is," says Nines, "I didn't want you to be at the restaurant today. I saw you at the door and I wished you'd turn back, because I didn't want Gavin to know you were there. Up until the moment that Colin brought the scallop espuma to your table, I half thought that I could make it happen."

"I'm sorry," says Connor.

"No, but I'm glad that you were there," says Nines. "It took some time and some whiskey for me to see it, but in the end, I think--"

His HUD pings with an incoming message, cutting him short. It's a number he recognizes now.

"What is it?" asks Connor.

"--It's Gavin," says Nines. "He wants me to come to the restaurant."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now boarding: express bus to bangtown.


	9. Entremets

## XXIV.

_Where are you come to lm if you can_

Then, thirty seconds later:

_This is Gavin. From the restaurant_

Which is an attempt at a joke, at least. Still, it doesn't stop Nines from sprinting all the way there, a six-foot tornado in a vest and tie, his shadow leaping wildly across the pavement as he barrels past each streetlight.

Out in the alleyway behind the building, the cats have clocked out for the night. The bucket and tarp have been cleared as well, but Nines fiddles with the key in the lock for a few excruciating seconds before he realizes why there's no telltale clink of the latch; the staff door has been left propped open.

 _For me,_ he thinks. _Open for me._

The frenzied whirring of his fan and pump nearly drowns out the sound of the door crashing closed behind him. When he stumbles into the kitchen, his voice, too, is an indistinct buzz to his own ears.

"--Chef," says Nines.

"Gold star," says Gavin, from where he's leaning against the prep table.

Nines pads over to him across the floor, the rushing in him tamed a little slower with each step he takes. Gavin's apron is absent. Through the unbuttoned front of his coat, an emblazoned logo on his t-shirt, TRAIL OF RED! WORLD TOUR. The whole kitchen is spick and span, Maddie's knife roll tied back up into its neat leather bundle at the garde-manger station.

"Looks nice in here," says Nines.

"I was so angry that I cleaned this whole fucking kitchen," says Gavin, "and I still couldn't calm down. I couldn't figure out why I still felt like shit, even after all the mops were washed and the dishes were put away. Just seething the entire time. And then I thought-- _where is Nines?"_

He digs the heels of his hands into his eyes, a shaky exhale.

"Tina kicked him out, but-- I didn't stop him from leaving," says Gavin. "Bad fucking move. The last time I was this mad about anything was when Fowler chewed me out. Only this time, you weren't here afterwards -- with your bag full of food, ordering me around -- and as far as I could tell, that's why I still felt like shit."

"I'm sorry," says Nines, quietly. "I didn't bring you anything to eat."

"That's fine, I'm not hungry," says Gavin. "Tell me about Grenache Gris."

"Tell you-- what?" asks Nines.

"Grenache Gris," says Gavin. "I had a bottle of it once, rosé, and I was thinking about it as I was turning the kitchen inside out. I want to know what you have to say about it."

"I can only make broad generalizations about the grape," says Nines. "That it was a varietal rosé is somewhere to start, but without knowing where it was grown, or which winemaker produced it and how, I can't tell you anything more than what you know from actually drinking it."

"Then tell me your broad generalizations," says Gavin. "Whatever you got."

"Well, it's," begins Nines, "a Grenache. They're hardy, they can take a lot in terms of weather, but they're also a bit mercurial in that they mutate more often than most other breeds. Grenache Gris is much lesser known compared to the Noir and Blanc colorations-- with the Gris, the skin develops a lavender tinge, somewhere in between purple and green."

He pauses, giving Gavin a moment to chime in with commentary as he likes; but Gavin just nods, hands lax on the edge of the station behind him.

"They're only very rarely planted with intent," continues Nines. "Mostly in the south of France, Languedoc-Roussillon, in the coastal regions. They're almost always used in blends, because there's no great demand for straight Grenache Gris, which also keeps the yield too low for a single-varietal to be profitable."

Gavin nods, again. Though he appears attentive enough -- none of the fidgeting that surfaces when there's something else on his mind -- Nines wonders how closely Gavin is listening to the actual lecture on Grenache Gris. If it isn't just the sound of Nines's voice that's being asked for, rather than a lesson on viticulture.

"You'll have to tell me about the rosé," says Nines. Low, like soothing a worried animal, a lullaby to ease the trouble. "When it's used to make a white wine, the result is aromatic and viscous. Notes of summer stone fruits, pear, green herbs, honeysuckle, spice. There's a distinctive minerality, often, that leans toward salt rather than ash-- that's the ocean at its doorstep, the Mediterranean coastline."

His eyes red-rimmed but stubbornly dry, Gavin stares down at their shoes on the rubber mat. Eight inches, if that, between Nines's foot and his. The nearness of their bodies, warming the space left unclosed.

"Nines," says Gavin, at last, "I need a fucking vacation."

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you that Hank Anderson was here," says Nines.

"Don't apologize for that," says Gavin. "Besides, you have to listen to my unhelpful Wine Spectator review now, so that probably makes us even."

"Fair enough," says Nines.

"I remember it was a very light rosé, barely any color to it," says Gavin, "with that salinity you were talking about. Say, for example, that you take a couple days off in the summer and head to a beach. Not tropical, but pretty temperate year round-- enough that when you wake up in the morning, forgetting for a second where you are, it's the humidity that reminds you that you're far from home. The humidity and the salt, sinking low into your lungs."

"Let's say that," says Nines.

"The first day, it's nice and clear out, just fucking perfect," says Gavin. "But the second day, you open the window and the sky's one gigantic slab of slate, so muggy you can barely breathe. On the third day, it rains so hard it _hurts--_ you feel the drops pelting you like birdshot when you dip underneath the surface of the water. You wake up in the morning and you don't know what kind of weather you're going to get. To be perfectly honest, it's kind of shitty a lot of the time."

Gavin is so still next to him that Nines, perversely, feels his heartbeat quicken in response. A boulder on the edge of a precipice, or something poised to strike. Risky.

"But no matter the weather, the ocean's still there," says Gavin, "which is what makes it all bearable. And it's-- nice, actually, just to come to a rest somewhere for once. Because no matter who you are, the ocean doesn't let you sink. That feeling, I know. The relief of giving yourself to something solid enough to hold you up."

He turns his face up towards Nines.

"The feeling I get," says Gavin, "when you look at me."

Nines holds his fists so tightly closed that the grinding of his frame rattles through him, up his arms like an earthquake tremor.

"--Gavin," he begins, strained to the point of fracture, "I don't think--"

"No?" asks Gavin, lightly.

Which is his brand of kindness; the last exit out, a chance for Nines to back off if he wants. But that's not it, _I don't want to back off. I just want to make sure._

"It's-- I know you're stressed right now," says Nines, "and if this is a way for you to decompress--"

"Jesus, please," exclaims Gavin, a flare of impatience overtaking his hard-won restraint. "Why does even _this_ get to be about them? Because it's not about them, or at least, it sure as hell isn't for me. Is it for you?"

"--No," says Nines. "It isn't."

"Just because something was interrupted," huffs Gavin, "doesn't mean it's not true."

 _He's right,_ thinks Nines. _We were on our way to something._ A phone call with no design behind it, _play it when you're lonely,_ but it's the warmth of Gavin's laugh afterwards that Nines comes back to now. As though it was a joke they'd be sharing, much later. _Remember when?_

Settled into his skin again, Gavin scratches at the back of his head.

"You know," he says, "I don't really get it."

"Get what?" asks Nines.

"Why you look at me like that," says Gavin. "But-- I do know what it means."

Slowly, he lists in place until Nines can feel the press of his body through fabric, a long, searing stripe up his arm.

"Aren't you going to kiss me?" asks Gavin.

Like someone possessed, Nines watches his own hand rise to Gavin's cheek, the prickle of his stubble against his palm. _I think that maybe, I always was going to kiss you._ The pump of his heart so fast it hammers like a river in a monsoon, the floodgates raised. _Sorry I made you wait._ Gavin leans into the touch, turns his head to graze his dry lips across Nines's palm, his eyes unbearably dark.

Nines ghosts his hand down to curl against Gavin's jaw, and leans in towards him, carefully. Gavin watches him draw near; then, just when they're close enough for the part of their lips to brush, he tilts his head back an inch.

"Do it like you want this," murmurs Gavin. "Like you want me."

 _Like you want me to want you?_ Hesitantly, Nines places an experimental hand on Gavin's chest, against the worn cotton of his shirt, and gives him the smallest push towards an open wall. Gavin breathes out and goes easy, letting himself fall back a step or two, though it couldn't have been force enough to unbalance him.

The Primitivo. Skirt steak with pomegranate molasses, black pepper, cruel but only cruel to be kind. This is what Gavin wants from him: sweet in the coming, a tornado when it lands. All the uncompromising brutality that Nines found disagreeable in himself, his grip built to shatter-- even that, _especially_ that, Gavin was inviting in. _Knowing full well the damage I could do to you. Taking me on._

Flying high with permission, Nines does as he's asked. Grabs a fistful of Gavin's coat collar and slams him up against the wall, nothing gentle about it, vicious enough for Gavin's breath to stutter. Just before he crashes their lips together, Nines sees Gavin's eyes go hazy as they slide closed.

Gavin sighs into his open mouth, arms winding readily around his neck. Lecithin, oleic acid, phosphorus, lactose, casein, vanillin, sucrose, _egg yolk, milk, vanilla, sugar,_ and distantly beneath it, the faint hint of an afternoon cigarette. The flavor of the kiss is sweet and full -- _creme anglaise --_ and Nines desperately searches for more of it, acquisitive with want. He laps up the taste in slow, steady licks, tracing the ridges of Gavin's palate, the plush flat of his tongue, the hot and tender walls of his mouth. Chases the flutter of the tip of Gavin's tongue as he explores Nines in turn, lighting up the firework webbing of his pleasure center, igniting itself to life. The way that Gavin's sharp canines feel when he brushes across them.

Even the smoke, like a good glass of Northern Rhone Syrah. _I have him,_ thinks Nines. _All of this is mine._ He winds a hand through the strands of Gavin's hair and pulls -- unhurried but steadily stronger -- until Gavin tips his head back with a shaky gasp, sucking the air from them both. Against the wall, he begins to sink to the floor.

Nines doesn't let him break contact, keeping his mouth on Gavin's and lowering them together until they're settled on the tiles, Nines between Gavin's legs, crowding him in. When Nines moves in closer to pin him in place, his knee presses against the heat between Gavin's thighs, a satisfying weight; Gavin makes a soft noise, his nails digging into Nines's shoulders.

For a second or two after Gavin starts smacking at Nines's chest, he pretends not to notice it. He could make a habit of this, built to navigate his surroundings through ingestion, narrowing the borders of the world until all he tastes is the bittersweet indulgence of Gavin's mouth. The unsteady shudder of Gavin's body against his. Finally, Gavin seems to remember that he can pull away instead of trying to push Nines off of him, and he twists his head to one side, panting shallowly.

"Felt like you were going to eat me," says Gavin, his eyes bright, in between gulps of air. Nines refrains from confirming that this isn't too far from the truth. Touching his tongue to the roof of his mouth, Gavin adds, "You taste like whiskey."

"You taste like creme anglaise," says Nines, and dives in for another go. Gavin ducks away, still breathless, half horrified and a little shy.

"It was just sitting there in the bowl," he says, "perfectly good creme anglaise. At least what didn't end up on the wall after I threw it. I thought it would be pointless to let it go to waste."

"Can I kiss you?" asks Nines.

"--You're really something else," mutters Gavin, coloring even further somehow. "Yeah, but-- not in here. Take me to the office."

"The back office here?" asks Nines.

"From now on, every time Fowler screams at me," says Gavin, "I want to be thinking about what you did to me there."

Nines grips Gavin by his arm and hauls him upright, practically dragging him out into the corridor, even though Gavin is every bit as eager to go as he is. In their wake, the fluorescents blink out one by one as Nines logs on and off the lighting system in record time, closing shop.

They fall into the windowless enclosure of the office, fumbling with their buttons, Gavin's hand tangled up in Nines's tie, his teeth nipping lightly at Nines's lower lip. Nines switches on the ceiling sconce and Gavin yanks at the chain of the banker's lamp, their vest and coat thrown across the surface of the desk. A sheaf of papers tumbles to the floor, strewn like confetti.

Only with Gavin spread out on the couch -- half engulfed in it, the cushions still dilapidated as the day they met -- the dim lights of the office pooling gentle shadows in the hollow of his throat -- do they pause to dwell over logistics. From on his hands and knees where he brackets Gavin, pulled down on top of him, Nines clears his throat.

"We may have a few options," he begins.

"Not food," says Gavin, very firmly. "I would rather get fucked dry than have to use olive oil. This is a matter of principle."

"--We may have fewer options than I previously thought," says Nines. "The best-case scenario would be finding lubricant in one of the desk drawers here. Should I go look?"

"To see if Fowler keeps lube at his work desk?" asks Gavin, in a tone of voice that truly highlights the inherent absurdity of the suggestion.

"Well," says Nines, "otherwise-- there's always android ejaculate."

"Your--?" asks Gavin, staring.

"There's a fair bit of glycerol in it," explains Nines, "which prevents the rapid evaporation that makes human ejaculate a subpar substitute for sexual lubricant. I should think that it would serve our purposes, if you're amenable to the idea."

Gavin lets out a long, strangled groan, and flings one forearm over his face.

"Is everything all right?" asks Nines.

"You just asked me if I would be okay getting worked open with your come," Gavin manages to say, eyes still covered. "God, all the blood shot to my dick so fast, I thought I was going to pass out. Jesus Christ."

"So--" starts Nines, appreciative but uncertain.

"Just," says Gavin, "get it up again as fast as you can," and rolls out from underneath him, hooking his heel against Nines's ankle and flipping him onto the couch.

Nines looks up at him. Tearing at Nines's belt and zipper with feverish voracity, Gavin appears as intent as he ever did in the kitchen-- though the flush of his face and the tent in his pants somewhat belie the professionalism of the situation. _But this is a man,_ thinks Nines, _whose job it is to figure out what to do with things._ Leaning on someone, it goes both ways. _If I don't yet know myself fully -- what I am, or what I am capable of -- this is a man who can figure that out._

Pulling the band of Nines's underwear past his half-hard cock, Gavin's jaw falls open when the whole of its length becomes visible.

 _"Why?"_ demands Gavin, almost indignantly. "What is the _need_ for you to be this fucking huge?"

"I can contact CyberLife about procuring a less intimidating appendage," says Nines.

"Don't even joke about that," says Gavin. He swallows thickly, palming Nines's cock and turning it over in his hands, his expression a mix of interest and naked hunger. "And you're cut," he adds, "for some reason."

"Is it really circumcision if this is the starting state?" asks Nines, though it's not easy to maintain a conversation about foreskins when Gavin keeps inspecting his cock like he has to write up a report on it.

"The default penis model at CyberLife is circumcised?" asks Gavin.

"I assume that Elijah Kamski--" begins Nines.

 _"No,"_ interrupts Gavin. "Sorry I brought it up, let's not." Still absently toying with Nines's cock, he continues: "I guess I'm not surprised you're cut, most humans are -- and you're pretty smooth, but so what, waxing exists -- I think it's how sleek it looks, that's what makes it feel so different. Makes it feel weirdly-- new, maybe. What do you even do with this thing?"

"Mostly," says Nines, "I touch it thinking of you."

"--Fuck," Gavin breathes out like he's been punched, and falls on Nines's cock.

He wraps his lips around the shaft, lowering his head down its length, his tongue a hot cradle against the seam along its underside. Just as slowly, he pulls back -- dragging the wet heat of his mouth up in agonizing increments -- until the crown of Nines's cock slips free, Gavin pursing his lips together to follow the slope of the glans. With a swipe, he laps at the fluid beading at its tip, his Adam's apple bobbing.

Nines watches Gavin swirl the blade of his tongue around the overhang, tracing its circumference. Stroking Nines's shaft as he licks figure-eight shapes onto the leaking head of it, feather-light brushes against his balls; all the while, Gavin watches him back, keen, hunting for what makes him feel good.

"Gavin," gasps Nines, more air than sound.

That, Gavin seems to like, smiling open-mouthed as he flicks his tongue-tip up against Nines's frenulum, a fleeting touch that makes Nines buck up in electric surprise. Gavin's hands come to rub across Nines's inner thighs, soothing but resolute, like he'll hold Nines down if he has to-- or try his damned best, at least.

Nines feels his cockhead glide over the grooves of Gavin's palate, hears himself choke out, _fuck,_ at the sensations that sends skittering to his pelvis, through his spine. If jacking himself off was releasing a valve, a quick and torrential escape of buildup, then _this is torture at its most tender,_ he thinks, so terribly hard that it almost hurts to keep still.

"--Shit," Gavin mutters suddenly, "I can't," and sits back on his heels.

The objection rises fast in Nines, laced with something like panic-- until he cranes his neck up and sees that Gavin is undoing the waist of his own pants. Gavin also seems close to panic as he clambers off the couch and kicks off each pant leg, yanking his underwear off to hurl it into a corner.

Nines relishes the moment, finally seeing more of him; Gavin's cock is fully hard, slick at the tip and starting to dampen the rest of the way. It nods against the trail of hair leading down from his abdomen, ruddy with arousal, maybe above average in length but -- more important to Nines -- _like he would taste good._ Savory and rich. Preoccupied with the thought, Nines nearly forgets to question the interruption.

"What's going on?" he asks, as Gavin returns to his perch.

"Pardon my language," says Gavin, "but you have a pretty great cock and blowing you is making my ass beg for it, so I need to touch myself right now."

"--Okay," says Nines, all of his circuitry fizzling completely blank.

"Just a little," says Gavin, like that's the relevant thing.

He reaches behind himself, then shudders, eyes glazing over as his lips fall parted. The muscles in his stomach twitch as he feels himself out, shallow still but enough to take him somewhere else. _He enjoys this,_ thinks Nines, _being fingered,_ and files it away for later. Gavin's wrist keeps skimming against Nines's leg as he strokes inside himself, his cock oozing with precome, a glisten in the lamplight.

Nines could watch it for much longer, but Gavin remembers first that he was in the middle of something. "My bad," he pants, and leans forward onto Nines's cock, taking it in his mouth again. This time, Nines feels the head of it scrape from Gavin's hard palate to the soft, then further, even further, into a silky tightness, until -- god -- it knocks against the back of Gavin's throat. A quick spasm, Gavin's throat squeezing around him, that makes Nines's HUD explode with stars.

 _"Fuck,"_ he exclaims.

"Ah," says Gavin, "he likes it."

 _Who wouldn't,_ Nines would counter, but Gavin settles in and doubles down on it. Bending his head that low angles his ass up higher, and Nines is torn between too many things to pay attention to, all of them obscene; Gavin's reddened lips stretching around his shaft, the texture of Gavin's throat, the undulating cling of it as it works him, the sight of Gavin fingering himself, hand moving past the curve of his ass, and the gag-reflex tears at the corners of his eyes as he keeps them locked on Nines's.

"Gavin," he groans, "shit."

He lifts an unsteady hand, brushing his thumb against Gavin's temple. Gavin hums in response and pumps the hand wrapped around Nines's shaft, sensing the peak on the horizon. Nines grabs at the wavy hair at the back of Gavin's head and tugs, hard, and Gavin draws in a sharp breath that suctions tight around his cock.

"God, _Gavin,"_ Nines grits out, "I'm--"

Hips thrusting of their own accord, he feels the orgasm build like a wave, just a swell of seawater in the vast wash of pleasure at first -- then, as it comes nearer, rising in uneven bluffs -- breaking to fizzle in spots, sparks on the edges of his vision, but steadily gathering -- higher, Gavin's eyes hot on his -- until the crest thunders above too high to hold, and it comes crashing over him at last, a solid wall, beating the air out of his lungs and dragging him down into the undertow.

The high-pitched ringing in his ears echoes for a long heartbeat. Above him, Gavin pulls off of his cock with a wet pop, mouth held pursed, then looks thoughtful as he pauses to taste what's already at the back of his throat. He picks up Nines's lax hand and carefully spits a palmful of synthetic spunk onto it, his tongue indecently red underneath the pearled rivulets running down its surface.

"Not bad," Gavin says, a little raspy, flushed dark and licking at his bottom lip. "I wouldn't have minded swallowing."

It's not an easy maneuver, but even in his semiliquid state, Nines is somehow able to keep his loaded hand level while he uses the other to lift Gavin off of him by the scruff of his neck. As Gavin sprawls back onto the couch, Nines rids himself fully of the clothes still hanging around his thighs. If this is what his million-dollar vestibular system gets him, Nines will make good use of what's been given, though he has to pause to catch his breath at the end of it.

He knows what he excels at; he learns, applies, and never forgets. There's a lot at his disposal. The instinctive knack of his sexuality subroutine, the protocols disseminated via specialized intimacy modules, the vast online resources he can sift through in just an instant of ad-hoc research. But none of it truly prepares him for the specifics of someone's body -- _Gavin's_ body -- or the experience of wanting what's in front of him, desire in the stunningly concrete. That, he has to take moment by moment, as uncharted in this as anyone else.

The reddened head of Gavin's cock with its dewed precome, like the ready flesh of a fruit ripe for the picking. Nines dances his fingers up the length of Gavin's shaft, arriving at the apex to thumb curiously at the slit of his cock, smearing the wetness there. Gavin curses, bucking up into Nines's touch.

"You can't do that," says Gavin, with some difficulty. "I'm not a teenager, I can't afford to waste an orgasm on a handjob."

"I can't touch you?" asks Nines.

"Don't say it like that, you're trying to guilt me into it," says Gavin. He's correct. "Just-- not there, not right now."

He raises his knees up, opening his legs wider with Nines hemmed in between them, a wordless yet unmistakable cue.

"Shirt off," he adds.

"I'm holding a handful of my own semen," says Nines, feelingly.

"I want to see you," says Gavin, and nudges Nines's ribs with the inside of his knee, a bit too lingering for it to be a strictly pragmatic gesture. Nines relents and folds his hand into a loose fist, hoping for the best.

It goes well enough with minimal acrobatics, considering that all this disrobing really ought to have happened before they embarked on the poorly planned endeavor of jumping on each other. Gingerly, Nines completes the final step of guiding his closed hand through his sleeve, letting the shirt crumple to the floor.

Satisfaction playing around the corners of his swollen lips, Gavin looks him up and down, eyes lit in the glow of the pump regulator. "I have done well," he murmurs, half to himself, which -- Nines has to admit -- is well worth the effort of ill-choreographed divestiture.

"Keep looking," says Nines, and braces his dry hand against the back of Gavin's knee.

He tilts his cupped palm, letting the come trickle down towards his fingers. Just tracing down the part of Gavin's ass makes his whole body jerk, his hole twitching under the returned attention, an inviting warmth against Nines's fingertips. Around his rim, Gavin's skin pulses with a restless need.

Gavin's hands aren't fragile, either, but Nines is built like a brick wall down to every last bit of him. He pushes two slow digits inside Gavin and -- before he even starts to move -- Gavin tips his head back with a hot little sigh, pleased already at the stretch of the knobs of Nines's knuckles. When he clenches around Nines, it feels like being begged to stay.

"Yes," gasps Gavin, "come on."

Nines knows that Gavin always runs a little hot, whatever he does, but-- this is almost too much. The blood in him like lava, a lick of heat from where they meet that comes snaking in upstream through Nines's veins, until the space behind his eyes swims like the air above summer asphalt. He twists his fingers and the walls of Gavin's ass wrap tight around him, so eager and writhingly alive, beckoning him further in, irresistible.

Underneath him, Gavin's cock jumps at the shift of Nines's fingers, leaking hard against his stomach. Gavin bites back a moan and shudders. He looks and feels so _good_ that Nines forgets to breathe for a moment, parched with want. What captivates Nines the most -- what really pools electric below his waist and brings him back to aching hardness -- is the thought that all this is his doing. That when Nines drags his fingers unhurriedly out of Gavin, when Nines strokes them steadily against his velvet insides, when Nines catches them in a wicked notch on his entrance-- Gavin feels all of it. _I make him like this,_ thinks Nines. This gorgeous, feverish thing.

"How come you get to keep your shirt on?" Nines asks him.

"--What?" asks Gavin, sounding dazed.

With his left hand, Nines rucks up the hem of TRAIL OF RED! WORLD TOUR until it's bunched up in hasty folds under Gavin's armpits, leaving his chest bare. This is something Nines should have done much earlier; _two to three months earlier, if possible,_ he thinks with regret. In spite of all the corded hunger in Gavin, his barbed-wire fences -- far from effusive, even at his kindest -- there are still things about him that incline to surprising lushness. His mouth, the taste of creme anglaise. This, the full swell of his chest, a pillowy curve that brims and heaves as he tries to get air.

Three fingers buried inside Gavin, Nines reaches up and palms the contours of his chest. Cups the ample underside of it and grabs ahold of a handful of pliable flesh, relishing the way Gavin's skin cleaves to his, how easy it is to knead the abundance there when Gavin gives him the license to. His nails scrape against a hardened nipple, a seed of stiffness against the creamy expanse.

"Fuck, _ah,"_ Gavin moans, arching up into the feeling.

"Sensitive," remarks Nines, out loud.

Under his attention, the nipple flushes a dusky rose, quivering unevenly with the rise and fall of Gavin's chest. Nines digs a fingernail into the tip of one as he presses the other down with the flat of his tongue, making Gavin flinch. He really does seem to be weak for it, responding to every touch with a kind of honest frisson far beyond what Nines thinks it would warrant. Goosebumps prickle across the naked dip of his chest.

"Don't be a fucking tease," groans Gavin.

"It's not teasing," Nines informs him very gravely, "if it works for you."

Sure enough, Gavin goes enticingly tight as he's played with, the involuntary spasms inside him proof that he's getting more than a little out of it. Mouth parted, Gavin shoves the side of his face into the couch, breaths coming shallow. Something about the way that his hair fans out against the cushions makes Nines anxious, nervous with appetite.

"Nines, stop," Gavin says at last, "going to come if you don't."

That's the exact opposite of a deterrent. "Can't do this, can't do that," says Nines. "I'm starting to wonder if you want to come at all. What's so terrible about that, anyway? It'll take the edge off."

"Not like this," pants Gavin. "You, inside me."

Nines had intended otherwise. He thought he'd make this last a bit longer: pet inside Gavin for the paper-rough give of his prostate, stroke against it over and over again until he falls to pieces, coming on Nines's fingers. He'd thought. As if intent had ever done anything for them. Their best-laid plans just a dog-eared atlas, abandoned on the side of a highway. Nines can't say no to him, not when he asks so nicely.

He sits back up and slips his fingers out of Gavin, giving him some time to catch his breath, though Nines does leave the t-shirt rumpled where it is because the sight of Gavin's chest isn't hurting anyone. Gavin descends slowly, like an unpinned feather in a breeze.

"That's classic you," says Gavin, when he can string a sentence together again. "You've always been like this."

"Like what?" asks Nines.

"You just-- take me in your hands and do as you like," says Gavin. "Telling me it's time to eat. Giving me shit at the wine bar. Lecturing me about myself. You get off on it, I think."

"Is that a problem?" asks Nines.

"--No," says Gavin, his eyes hot.

One hand around his own length to guide the going, the other gripping at the juncture of Gavin's hipbone, Nines lines up the head of his cock at Gavin's ass. At the nudge of his hardness, Gavin's entrance squirms to meet it, an impatient nibble at something not given to him promptly enough, just kissing at the tip of it.

"No need to rush me," says Nines, his mouth going dry.

"Who's rushing you," counters Gavin, "take your fucking time," as he lifts his hips to grind the cleft of his ass against Nines's cock.

"Don't think I won't," says Nines. 

The breaching is much of the exertion, trying to make it past the taut outer ring of Gavin's ass without hurting him too much. Even pliant with arousal, Gavin struggles a bit at the sheer girth of Nines, the flared crown stretching him until the ache wavers on the edge of discomfort. He reaches down and finds Nines's hand at his own cock, and curls his grip around Nines's wrist, bitten fingernails digging into his skin.

Gavin is gritting his jaw too hard. "Breathe, Gavin," says Nines, and slides the hand at his hip up into his mouth, wedging a few fingers in between his teeth. Gavin bites down on them as he's told to, then -- for some reason -- starts to laugh.

"What?" asks Nines, perplexed.

"You're keeping a wet hand and a dry hand," Gavin says, still laughing, "like you're breading me to be deep-fried."

It's not _not_ funny, but Nines takes the moment of lax distraction to snap his hips forward, pushing his way past the rim in one quick thrust. Gavin yelps in surprise, hand clamping around Nines's wrist. He shoots Nines a glare of feigned betrayal, but it's good for both of them, the thickest part of Nines settled inside Gavin, ready for the taking in. Knuckle by knuckle, Gavin's grip falls loose.

They exhale in unison as Nines begins to move in shallow strokes, just getting Gavin used to it. Sweet friction against the sensitive edges of his hole, rubbing those keen first few inches inside him, heating him up with a slow and deliberate stoking. Nines dimly registers himself mouthing something, _god, Gavin,_ at the overwhelming sensation of being swallowed, Gavin fitted so closely around his cock. It's so impossibly hot and soft inside him, a silk stranglehold. The way his walls part in tender permission when Nines pushes in, only to cling all around him and drag him lovingly back when he draws out.

"Nines," breathes Gavin, "more."

With searching swivels of his hips, Nines angles his cock up towards Gavin's stomach, gliding along his insides for the telltale shift of texture. Gavin likes that well enough, small sighs slipping from his lips whenever Nines moves; but then the head of Nines's cock scrapes against it at last, that ardent knot of nerves, and the current visibly shoots through him like the crack of a whip.

 _"--Ah,"_ he gasps, his voice breaking helplessly as he curves up off the couch, eyes snapping wide open. He squeezes so tight around Nines that it's nearly like being bitten, a convulsive instant that makes Nines wince in pain. Then just as quickly -- before the pang even subsides -- Gavin melts beautifully around him, a wash of rolling warmth like an apology, sucking him in another inch deeper.

"There?" asks Nines, as if there's any question.

"Please," murmurs Gavin, "yes."

Wild, the way this works. Nines skims the switch of Gavin's prostate with every thrust, marveling at what it does to him. _What I do to him._ A saucepan of sugar over a flame, turning the grains to liquid gold, lit from within. The catch when he inhales, how his head tosses back when Nines drives into him, leaving the line of his throat bare. Gavin comes unraveled underneath him. The bulwarks of his labyrinth razed to the ground, the heat of his body that can't lie or hide a thing.

He keeps lifting his hips up to meet Nines better, but-- surely it must be a strain with his knees propped up, even if Gavin doesn't seem to notice it in the moment. Instead, Nines takes Gavin's ankles in his hands, hitching his legs up over his shoulders without breaking pace. Gavin groans, half at the way it mashes Nines's cock into his spot, a clean straight line, half at the nonchalant ease with which he does it.

"Jesus, Nines," he manages, "you fucking beast."

Nines looks down at him, at the wet fan of his lashes, the tremor in his limbs. _Take me in your hands and do as you like._ Grabbing at the sweat-damp planes of Gavin's waist, he yanks him onto his cock, hard, at the same time as he slams inside. It wrenches a delicious noise from Gavin, his whole body drawing taut as a bow, brought to the bare edge of orgasm for a single piercing moment. Sooner than he can relax, Nines plunges into him again, rough enough for the couch to lurch beneath them.

"Gavin," he says. "Look at me."

It's not easy for Gavin to look at anything, his eyelids fluttering unsteadily as Nines fucks into him, all of him jolted whichever way Nines moves. Tossed like a craft in a sea storm, Gavin gives into the feeling -- undeniable as a riptide, sweeping him off his feet -- pouring all his meager focus into trying to meet the sear of Nines's eyes. In his plush mouth, his tongue stirs silently, shaping around the halfway forms of words left unvoiced.

At Zabuton, Gavin glaring out into the dining room like he was bracing for a fight -- the day they met, here in the back office, Gavin disheveled and irritable with his dumpster hangover -- every time Nines looks at Gavin, he hears something calling his name. Something asking for him. _Like I was made just for you._ Nines came to Les Mignardises intending to be trouble, elbowing his way where he was never meant to go; and still, when he sinks inside Gavin, not a thing seems out of place. All the violence in him, _just a way to hold you closer to me._

"Tell--" starts Gavin.

"Yes?" asks Nines.

"Tell me," begs Gavin, "to come."

 _"--Chef,"_ Nines chokes out, caught unawares. "Fuck."

Gavin is so close already, his leaking cock hard against his abdomen, jumping and spilling over with fluid every time Nines pushes into him. Humming with the nearness of it, held in precarious balance. The erratic twitch of his inner walls, growing quicker and quicker the higher he's taken. And if all he needs to bring him over the brink is Nines telling him what he wants from him--

"Do it," says Nines. "Come for me."

As Nines hits the pebbled spot inside him one more time, Gavin stutters out a moan -- the sound so nakedly obscene that it ricochets through Nines like a bullet -- and comes untouched all over himself, thick strands splattering up to his sternum, stark against his flushed skin. Inside, he clenches so tight that Nines's cock may as well be laundry wrung dry; for a dizzying second, the sight of an empty garden flashes across the back of his mind, stepping stones dotting the grass, circles in the sand. It's only through some misaligned force of will that Nines manages not to come, stilled in place, shaking his head to clear it of the scenery.

When the corners of Nines's vision refocus, he pulls back the slightest bit. Oversensitive off his orgasm, Gavin makes a broken little noise, too spent to do anything but shudder at the sensation.

"Hold on," says Nines, "trying to give you a break."

"No," says Gavin, hoarse. "Keep going."

"You just--" Nines starts to protest.

"It's okay," says Gavin. "Please. I want it."

 _You've always been like this, too,_ thinks Nines, at his mercy. Gavin, always determined to take him on even when it was a little too much, bearing his weight. Bruises around his wrist, at the riverfront lighthouse where Nines couldn't have possibly been welcome-- always, even when Nines was too prying, too insistent. Taking him on.

Gavin's hand comes up to clutch at Nines's shoulder. Unable to put enough strength into the grip, his palm slips against muscle, sliding off to rest in the crook of Nines's elbow. Nines can feel him tremble as he helps Gavin through the brunt of it. Any motion at all, no matter how small, makes Gavin flinch and gasp, spasming inside all over again. He's clearly overwhelmed, to the point that it worries Nines.

"Are you sure?" asks Nines. "If it's too much--"

"It's okay," Gavin repeats. "It's good."

So Nines moves, taking nothing that wasn't willingly given. Small and shallow until the furrow between Gavin's eyebrows starts to fade, until the sharpness of his inhale turns sweet, the pleasure slowly overtaking the pain. Even when the discomfort of the edge mellows out, Gavin in his second wind seems more-- _heightened_ than before; a bit more openly starved for touch, a bit less inhibited, even considering that there wasn't much inhibition there in the first place.

Trailing his fingertips through the streaks of come painting his torso, Gavin runs a hand over his own chest. The slicked pads of his fingers find a peaking nipple, still stiff from climax, and Gavin sighs heatedly as he teases himself. A glistening smear of come coating the swollen nub of it, absolute filth.

"What do I do with you," says Nines, in despair.

"Kiss me, maybe," says Gavin.

What a great idea. With Gavin's legs slung over his shoulders, Nines near folds him in half when he leans in for the kiss. At how deep it drives Nines into him, the sound in Gavin's throat shatters to something like a sob, the head of Nines's cock pushing against the bend far inside him.

"I think you can take it," Nines says against Gavin's lips, before he slots their mouths together.

As Gavin shifts underneath him, bearing down as best as he can to accommodate what remains of Nines's length, Nines does his part to distract him from the effort. Running his teeth along the inside of Gavin's lower lip, licking at the supple febrile membrane of his mouth, stroking his tongue and coaxing him to breathe. Reaching up to play with Gavin's chest, caressing yielding handfuls of flesh and rolling a pert nipple between his fingers until Gavin whines quietly and lifts his chest towards it. His walls swirl and wind close around Nines's cock, so unbelievably hot.

 _I make him like this._ Gavin is so responsive to everything that Nines is heady with the power it grants him, knowing how easy it would be to push him too far, _but I'll only wreck you as badly as you want me to._ Holding back is a kind of prerogative, in its own right. That he waits, seated patiently inside Gavin until -- with a ragged exhale -- something straightens within him like the unfurling of a leaf, and Nines slides in the rest of the way, buried to the hilt.

"Good," Gavin mumbles indistinctly. "All of you."

It's-- incredible. It's less about the material sheathing of his whole length than it is about the thought of what Gavin has done for him, that Gavin wanted Nines inside him badly enough to make room for him. Shaping himself around Nines, changed by their collision. With his mouth at Gavin's jaw, Nines wonders if he could write the record of it all across Gavin's body, marking him over and over again until their history becomes an indelible thing. Nines dreams of mattering, and sinks his teeth into the crook of Gavin's shoulder.

The sound that Gavin makes doesn't quite resolve into language, the surprise only fleeting before he goes slack again. His head bowed to one side as he drops, offering up the open column of his neck, the pulse at his jugular jumping wildly.

"I think," says Nines, "your bruises are the best thing about you."

_The way you wear your past on your skin, leaving none of yourself behind. In the morning, you'll carry the trace of this, like you carry the trace of everything else that has touched you. That's you. But this corner of you is mine._

With difficulty, Gavin threads his fingers through the hair at the back of Nines's head, the lax weight of his hand like the curl of a warm animal.

"Then move," he murmurs.

 _If you like it, then don't be afraid of it._ Nines recedes from the shoreline, the massive drawback before a tsunami, rearing away from the cling of Gavin's ass around his cock. Just the head of it barely still in him, holding him ready. Then -- measured but relentless, no haste to his movement but no lenience either -- Nines shoves his way back inside Gavin with tidal force, ramrod-thick down the center of his thrumming body, the thrill a thing that pries them both open and undoes them until the light spills through their skin.

 _"Nines,"_ pleads Gavin. "God, ah, Nines."

With his mouth at Nines's ear, every wet hitch in his breath is a lightning bolt down Nines's spine, forking its way through his veins to gather at his groin. Nines nips at the sinews of Gavin's throat, traveling up the salt lick into the hollow beneath his jaw-- and Gavin tilts into him, rubbing his cheek against Nines's temple, like something feral that imagined being otherwise.

The rhythm they fall into is deep and steady, Nines pulling his hips back and grinding them forward until his front presses up snug against the firm curve of Gavin's ass. Still tender off his earlier orgasm, the way that Gavin pulsates inside is only partly knack, partly the reflex of a body too sensitized not to feel the smallest stir as a shock of pleasure. Whenever Nines nudges against the plumped swell of his prostate, Gavin's cock leaks a clear spurt of fluid onto his stomach, defenseless against the onslaught of sensation.

"This," groans Gavin, "I-- wanted this."

"Did you," asks Nines.

"Yeah," says Gavin, "couldn't stop-- thinking about--"

He swallows to ease his parched throat, wincing at a particularly deep stroke.

"Aching, the whole time--" he says, "all through service."

"Shit," curses Nines, _"fuck,"_ as his hips stutter out of control, throwing him off his cadence. The perfect picture of Gavin flustered at work with the buzz of the kitchen around him, burning up underneath his coat and apron, driven to distraction by what he hoped Nines would do to him. _When?_ thinks Nines. _How many times, reporting after service, did I speak to him without knowing he'd spent the day wanting me?_

"Your fault," says Gavin, bumping his forehead against Nines's in mock reprimand. "Always-- _ah--_ standing so close-- looking at me, like that."

"I'm not sorry," Nines tells him.

"That's fine," pants Gavin, "I liked it."

His hand finds its way to his cock, swaying heavily between them. Biting at his lip, he gives himself a few quick pumps, fingers running slick with precome. It's a good show, Gavin touching himself the way he might when he's alone, frantic for release-- but Nines doesn't quite want the glorious sticky mess of it to be covered up, wants to watch it jerk in response when Nines churns inside him.

Nines takes Gavin's sopping wet hand by the wrist and pins it above his head, against the armrest of the couch. "No," he says. "I want you to come on my cock."

"I _did,"_ protests Gavin.

"That's how I know you can," says Nines.

Gavin stares up at him unsteadily like there's an argument to be had, but in the end, he just flushes and gives a small nod. Nines suspects that he doesn't exactly mind being held down, either.

"But then," says Gavin, "--harder."

Of course, when he asks so nicely. Nines is nearly at his limit anyway, the regular tempo he's set starting to falter as the pressure builds in his balls, every now and then an uneven thrust coming too fast on the heels of the last, catching Gavin off guard and startling him into a full-body shiver. The smoke in their nest of tinder blooming to embers, headed towards the open flame. The finesse of everything Nines has taught himself peels back, exposing a need that shines raw and artless at its core, a drop of sweat arcing down from the nape of his neck onto Gavin's collarbones.

"Yes," gasps Gavin as Nines slams into him, the strength of it pushing him up towards the armrest. "Nines, _please."_

"Little longer," huffs Nines, "hang on."

"Let--" says Gavin in between the waves, "I won't," and his hand twitches in Nines's hold. _Won't touch myself,_ he seems to mean. Nines takes his word for it, lifts his hand off of Gavin's wrist -- _next time,_ he thinks, _until you bruise there again_ \-- and fucks into Gavin fiercely enough for it to stay with him, the soreness like a brand.

Overcome with all of it -- the pleasing throb of being stretched open, the fullness of a cock nestled in him from root to tip, his body forced to ride the high of ceaseless arousal for much too long -- Gavin throws his shaky arms around Nines's neck, hanging on for dear life. This close, Nines can hear the deer run of Gavin's heart, helter-skelter. Gavin is so viciously rocked every time that Nines moves, he doesn't have much choice in the matter but to clutch to him; but still, he seems relieved to do it. To have some excuse to lean on Nines, for someone else to take his weight.

"--Nines," Gavin says, "Nines, _ah,_ god-- _Nines,"_ just repeating his name over and over again, like he has to remind himself that it's real. It's an odd feeling, to be wanted so badly. Nines has scarcely become acquainted with _wanting,_ the tricky business of recognizing it in himself and labeling it, but this -- being wanted -- is another thing altogether, a heavier charge. "Nines," calls Gavin. _Nines,_ he hears Gavin say, slouching on an upturned bucket in the alleyway, crowned with smoke. _Nines._

"Gavin," says Nines, and turns his head to kiss him.

There's a desperation to it, this close to the crest. Gavin is so winded that he can barely keep up, struggling for air only to be drawn back to Nines's lips like a trance, winding their tongues together. Nines maps out all the thorough nooks of his mouth, kisses him hard until it's more than he can take-- until Gavin starts to go under, the flicker of his tongue growing sluggish.

"Nines," Gavin sighs into his mouth, with all the breath left in him, "can--"

"Yes?" asks Nines.

"--Come inside me," whispers Gavin.

Nines hears something snap. A snarl caught at the back of his throat, he surges into Gavin, crushing the head of his cock against the tremor of his walls, the buildup of pressure in him hurtling and cracking through his bones like the domino fracture of a roof collapsing -- and when his climax caves it in, a flood of the open sky, he thinks about Gavin's torrid insides spattered with this profane residue of himself, marked so deep that no one else could possibly overwrite it -- _this corner of you is mine_ \-- Nines would fill him up if he could, overtaking him from the inside out, claiming all of it -- his quiet laugh out on the balconet, the fidget at the sleeve of his bomber jacket -- even the twist of his knuckles in a wet hand towel as he sat on this couch, cagey and tired, and neither of them knew what exactly it was they were headed for--

And Nines makes him like this: The feeling of Nines spurting inside him is what sends Gavin over the edge, digging his nails into the meat of Nines's shoulders. His whole oversensitized body contracting with the ferocity of what grips him, his heels urging spurs at Nines's back, the convulsive embrace of his insides rubbing and kneading all along Nines's pulsing length -- and the ruined look on his face sears its way into Nines's memory, the spit-slick part of Gavin's lips, his eyes sliding closed in a sweep of tear-clumped lashes -- fresh ropes of come across the gorgeous mess of his chest, trickling to pool down the gorge in between. He's well beyond knowing what he's saying anymore, and Nines is well beyond hearing it with any clarity, but what slips from Gavin's mouth as he shudders apart sounds a little like disbelief: _You really want--,_ he manages to get out, before his voice frays into a wordless moan, utterly lost.

Coming untouched for the second time in a row really seems to have done a number on Gavin, and it takes a while for Nines to bring him down. He just shivers under Nines's hands as Nines pets him through the aftershocks, trying to give him something to ground the reverb, fleeting touches across the tender rise of his nipples, a thumb stroking down the vein of his twitching cock. When the spasms of his ass taper off and some focus starts to return to his eyes, Nines draws gingerly out of him with immense regret; Gavin's body jerks one more time, his walls a lingering hold to the last.

 _"Ah,"_ Gavin exclaims softly, then adds, after a moment, "--holy _shit,"_ which is how Nines knows he's coming back to it.

"All right?" asks Nines.

"No," says Gavin, the word trailing off into a leaden groan. "Pretty sure I died."

"Same here," says Nines, and coughs.

Gavin drags himself halfway upright against the armrest, and pulls Nines down for a kiss. They're so exhausted that it's more or less just both of them panting into each other's mouths, but Nines is glad for it anyway. An anchoring contact, feeling each other descend; at every pulse point the thudding of their blood, old Camargue music of horse hooves pounding through the delta, slowing to a rest with the birds in the knee-deep river grass. In the silvered reflection off the nailbeds of the Rhone, the mark of his teeth starting to set at Gavin's neck.

"Good," says Gavin. "I'd be so mad if you weren't even winded after all of that."

"I'm _very_ winded," says Nines, plaintively.

"Score," says Gavin. "I probably won't be able to walk tomorrow, but still, score."

"Though the real lasting casualty," says Nines, "is this couch."

Gavin peers at the disgusting state of it beneath them, unspeakable stains from a range of their bodily fluids seeping into the upholstery, far past saving. He considers it for a moment, then shrugs and sinks back squarely onto a wet patch.

"What the hell, we'll flip the cushions over," he says. "We can get a new one after our star."

"That's upbeat of you," says Nines. "You know you can do it?"

"You get any competing job offers?" asks Gavin. "Anybody trying to poach you?"

"What?" asks Nines. "No, of course not--"

"Then yeah," says Gavin. "I can do it."

Nines looks at Gavin, come drying on the edges of his crumpled shirt and running down the insides of his thighs, squalid beyond belief. Prepared to give Nines everything he could possibly ask for.

 _Maybe, after all this,_ thinks Nines, _I'm just beginning to get to know you._ Every day, you gather up all of yourself and walk out the door, changed; _I know you now, and I'll know you as you'll become. This isn't how it ends._ Shifting to better fit each other into the shape of themselves, every day at the threshold of the road, turning their feet towards the next waymark. _This is mile one._

"So," says Gavin, "you ready to start something?"

Nines feels his heart pick back up, a marching beat.

"Yes," he says, "Chef."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOW DO YOU DO, FELLOW PERVERTS?


	10. Mignardises

## XXV.

It dipped below freezing, the night before. A brittle crust of frost shatters from around the edges of the staff entrance when Gavin tugs it open, the doorknob a shock of metallic chill against his bare palm. He beats his hands together as he makes his way to the kitchen, switching the lights on and noting with satisfaction that the stockpot is still cheerily simmering away on the back corner burner where he left it.

_Though Nines would have known,_ he thinks, _if anything went wrong overnight._

Unbidden, the question flits across his mind -- _even if the kitchen did go up in flames, when exactly would he have told you, last night? --_ and it's far too early in the morning for that sort of thing, for the ache to build again in his hips where Nines's hands gripped him, his face pressed into the bedsheets, just hours ago. Irritated with his own train of thought, Gavin hangs up his jacket, forgoes his chef's coat -- no sense in making laundry when it's not a service day -- and knots the apron strings like girding himself.

This is just like that chrome-plated piece of shit, too. To shoulder his way somehow into Gavin's reverie on what is supposed to be a tranquil and focused morning of work, without even physically being present in the building. Or as physically absent as he can be, hooked up as he is to all their light fixtures and security systems, _he probably knows exactly where I'm standing and exactly what I'm doing right now._ Instead of the indignation that Gavin means to provoke with the thought, it just makes the back of his neck prickle with promise, a hot stab of something down his spine.

Resigned, Gavin lifts up the lid of the stockpot. A cloud of fragrant steam billows out as soon as he gives it room, ten hours of heat melding the ingredients to a symphony. Chicken trimmings, vegetable scraps, everything but the kitchen sink. He unhooks a ladle from the overhead rack and dips it into the pot, a spoon's worth of patience pooling luminous at the bottom of the scoop.

It's worth every minute of the ten-hour undertaking. Gavin feels the cold ebb from him when he tastes it, draining him of all the tightness of winter. Sated of a paucity he didn't even know was in him, all his frozen edges thawing, unwound to the perfect stillness of the vernal equinox. The jigsaw lengths of chicken neck, a smoked and weighty base note; midtones suffused with earthy sweetness, halves of garlic and onion, carrots and parsnips and celery; an herbal inflection from the grassy heads of root vegetables, a handful of leeks, the sundry perfumes of a bouquet garni; bright at the top with charred lemon, just a hint of light amidst the warmth. A depth of flavor that doesn't make any demands of you, complex as it is. Something you could sink into.

Skimmed and strained through cheesecloth, the tester batch makes six quarts of liquid sun. Gavin leaves the Cambro on the station and rummages in the cooler for the eel, the firm heft of its ice-numbed length a cool silver belt in his hands, spanning the sink and then some when he lowers it onto a cutting board under running water. Daggertooth pike conger, _hamo, said Karin, its fin trailing out of the bamboo basket,_ and the muscle memory of cleaning it comes back to him as he rinses the sheen from its skin. Just when he brings his knife down onto its head, severing the neck and opening up the body, Nines walks in.

"Good morning," says Nines, "Chef."

Gavin feels his face flush hot; _Chef,_ Nines murmured into his ear last night, _just a little more,_ his whole front curved close against Gavin's back, the thrum of his voice so irresistibly tender, you would never know how punishing he was down below, slamming inside Gavin with such brutal strength that the bedroom kept whiting out with every thrust--

"--For fuck's sake," mutters Gavin.

"Something wrong?" asks Nines.

"You can't call me _Gavin_ here and call me _Chef_ in bed," says Gavin, slitting the stomach of the eel with a long, peevish stroke of the knife. "It's confusing."

"Confusing how?" asks Nines, tilting his head, the picture of innocence.

"For my dick," snaps Gavin.

"I see," says Nines. Then, after a thoughtful pause, his voice pitched a whole octave lower: "--Gavin."

"You're such a fucking asshole," says Gavin. "What made you like this?"

"I wonder," says Nines, and pulls up a stool to watch him work.

It's different from the way he came, at the tail end of summer. Gavin remembers Nines as the sheer drop of a seaside cliff, an uncompromising wall of limestone towering above the shore, pristine and callous and grim. This Nines, peering into the sink with such keen interest, never missing a moment to prod at Gavin, seems at times like someone else altogether; _but I suppose a lot has changed here, too,_ thinks Gavin. The restaurant is a different place now with Nines heading up the floor, a trim and tidy war machine. At the debriefings, the end-of-service reports, the family meals, it's hard to remember the way things were before he became a part of it. Before the seat to Gavin's right was always his, a flash of sable in the corner of Gavin's eye.

"So-- you dropped it off?" asks Gavin. "Did it fit next to the bed?"

"I had to move the bedside table," says Nines, "but yes."

"Better that than setting it up in the living room," says Gavin. "You know, it's not nice, getting woken up in the middle of the night because your big hulking ass has to climb out of bed and jostle the mattress around just to go charge yourself somewhere else. Back to your place or my living room, same difference, I just want a good night of undisturbed sleep."

Nines opens his mouth like he's going to point out something that Gavin doesn't necessarily want pointed out in the light of day, so Gavin very deliberately grabs a handful of eel intestine and yanks it out of the crevice of its abdomen, staring Nines down as he does it.

Unfortunately, it's pointless to try to intimidate Nines with a show of viscera. "Of course, Chef," he says, undeterred. "I'm sure you want me to stay in bed because it annoys you when the mattress moves."

"So much," says Gavin.

He washes out the cavity of the eel and slides the tip of his boning knife up against its spine, running the blade down inside the length of its body. The rhythmic scrape of metal against each vertebra, a chipper sound like a percussion washboard, parting flesh from rib. When he opens the fish up into a butterfly and drags the knife along the flip side of the spine, it lifts up clean in ridges of pale cartilage and bone, hardly any meat left clinging to it. The beautiful clarity of the cut, a satisfaction all its own.

What he learned from butchery is that every living thing is made to come apart. Breaking down an animal -- pulling muscle from muscle, carving it into shapes you can understand -- has nothing to do with force. It's about finding the seams in something that once looked whole, the prod of a knife in just the right place, letting the body do its own work of coming undone. Letting it give way on its own terms, along the lines that were always etched beneath the skin.

Nines watches him set the spine of the eel aside, evidently as pleased as Gavin is by how little flesh remains on the bone.

"Of all the knives in your roll," he says, "I think I like the boning knife the best."

"Why?" asks Gavin.

"It's interesting that something so sharp can still bend," says Nines, "and that takes nothing away from its sharpness. I like that."

Gavin switches back to the deba knife to press its heel against the dorsal fin, the entire fringe coming plucked from the eel's back with the sound of a zipper running closed. He skims his palm across the surface of the fillet and the pinbones bristle up to meet him, a million tiny needles, too numerous to pull free and too tough to ignore.

"You see the bones here?" he asks Nines. "You can't eat them and you can't get rid of them, so Kyoto chefs use a specific knife to chop them up so small that you don't notice them at all. Tricky stuff. You need something that's strong enough to slice through bone, but with enough of an edge not to turn the meat to mush."

"Hamogiri," says Nines, his LED blinking yellow.

"Yeah," says Gavin. "That would be my favorite knife in the roll, if I could afford one."

The deba does the job for now, though it doesn't have the razor-straight edge of a hamogiri, and he needs to compensate for the curve by using the weight of his hand to stop the knife from reaching the skin. _All in a day's work,_ he tells himself, and starts cutting.

More than twenty-five incisions per inch. A bare millimeter between one notch and the next. The soft crunch of the knife severing pinbone after pinbone after pinbone, long even strokes of his wrist that settle into music, scoring the eel until the edge of the blade nearly kisses the skin on the far side, leaving the fillet still whole. Three hundred cuts for every foot of fish, the kitchen narrowing down to just him, the knife, the eel, the whisper of bone giving way under steel, a trance of repetition. It's a lively knife, this token from Novi -- every chance he gets to use it, he falls back in love -- each bite of bone vibrating delicately back up into his hand, his whole arm from shoulder to fingertip lit up with feedback.

_What if --_ he thinks _\-- you didn't have to prove what you were good for?_ If, like a knife, you could be placed into the steady hands of someone who knew what you could do. Nines came to Les Mignardises at the tail end of summer, straight-backed as a cypress, neat in his right angles. Not a hair out of place on his perfect head. Gavin didn't understand it: _What could you possibly want from me,_ the question thick in his throat, every time Nines stood so close it burned him. Why someone like that would keep knocking at his door. _I don't have anything for you. Stop, or I'll get the wrong idea,_ until it wasn't the wrong idea at all, until Nines looked at him and he knew -- though it made no more sense than it did before -- _you could have anything you wanted, but this is what you want._

Hank Anderson came into this kitchen once, the tweed fabric of his coat rough against Gavin's cheek. _Rebuilding is a luxury,_ he said. _You don't uncover some fully-formed statue of yourself in the desert._ And if that's the way it goes, if you have to carve yourself out of sandstone from scratch, then -- even if it's just for a little while -- couldn't you hand the chisel to someone else for a change? Someone who knows what you look like, or what you _could_ look like, in their steady hands. _Nines. I don't have anything for you, but maybe you can change that._

Three hundred cuts for every foot of fish, it takes him four full minutes to reach the end of the eel, the movement of his knife an intricate see-saw following the taper of its silhouette. Gavin blinks back to the kitchen and looks up to find Nines watching him, gunmetal eyes like dissecting pins.

"--What," says Gavin, self-conscious, wiping his hands on the side towel.

"Did I tell you," asks Nines, "why I deviated?"

"No," says Gavin. "But what are you asking me for? You know you didn't tell me."

"That's true," says Nines. "I suppose I wanted you to know that it's something I mean to tell you. I will, when the time seems right."

"Now's not right?" asks Gavin.

"We're at work, Gavin," says Nines, very archly.

"Oh, sure," says Gavin. "It's our day off and you're not in uniform, but we're _at work_ when it suits you. I should have clocked in."

"You should have," agrees Nines. "It's menu work, it counts."

"Tell Fowler that," Gavin says over his shoulder, heading to the fridge for the garnishes. He stops by the burners on his way there, ladles the stock into a saucepan about an inch deep, bringing it back up to a boil.

Menu work; and if that hasn't been a long time coming. In the end, it was the feeling of Nines's eyes on him that did it: Nines looking at him from across the kitchen that night, telling him, _I know you._ Something lodged in him shook loose, a boulder the size of himself. Nines had shaped this restaurant, hadn't he, another seat at the table like he'd always been there. Wasn't that what it meant to belong, your fingerprints on the countertops?

And if Nines was shaping _him,_ chisel in hand -- leaving him changed in all the ways they'd been thrown together -- then what did it mean for a menu to be his, anyway? _Haven't I been going at this the wrong way round?_ He'd been wrestling with it the whole time, _what is my menu, mine,_ without asking the more important question first. _What makes your menu yours?_

What makes _you,_ if not the hands that were laid upon you? What if you didn't have to prove what you were good for? What if you could take the chisel and pass it around the circle, to all the people who knew you enough to mark you, each in their own small, private way? Every inch of you, carved by someone that meant something to you. The menu, theirs.

Gavin portions off three slabs from the eel fillet, two inches each, draping them across the bottom of a shallow black stoneware bowl. Delicate in their translucence, their edges smudge to dark against the ceramic. A nest of fresh pike congers slumbering on ice, pulled from the back of the Miller & Miller van. _Chris._ Thoughtful as ever for the things he gathered and gave, lifting the box gingerly into Gavin's arms like he didn't want to wake them.

Hair-thin wisps of scallions, a flourish of coils when he pulls them from their bath. Two young heads of dandelion, a dollop of shaved ginger, nestled golden in the sanctuary of the bowl -- a blanket of prairie meadow, spread across a brackish seabed -- just a few flecks of Aleppo pepper, flashes of poppy-red. _Ben._ Arranged in exacting balance, the kind of plating that knows the devil in the details, Ben's eye for the little things that he never lets slide. Ben adds, and Maddie stays his hand. _Maddie._ The unpretentious decency of her down-home restraint, knowing when to stop, giving the dish space to breathe. When Gavin straightens back up, all that's on the plate is just enough.

The two years he spent in Novi. _Karin._ How she nailed the eel onto a wooden board and split it to the chin, held down the postmortem thrashing of its body until a line cook coughed in the stillness of the kitchen, discomfited. But that was Karin. That first winter, everything that Gavin owned crammed inside the backpack slung over his shoulder, she'd lit his cigarette for him as they leaned against the wall out behind Zabuton.

_Welcome,_ she said. _I know you don't want to be here._

His mouth was dry, the cigarette clamped tight between the jitter of his fingers. _Thanks,_ he said, _for the second chance._

_No, not your second,_ she said. _This is your first chance._

Aching and feverish, he didn't understand what she meant, then. Just tipped his head back until he could feel the bricks dig into his scalp, any sensation at all to root him to the ground, and it was easier to breathe smoke than the searching severity of the jagged winter air. _Your first chance._ A new start, a slate so clean that you could make yourself anyone you wanted to be. _Whatever you were before, here,_ she meant, _you don't have to be that anymore._

Gavin takes the saucepan off the stove, the rim of the stock sizzling as it tilts and meets hot metal. Ten hours of perseverance, distilled. _Tina._ Her disastrous, magnificent, bullheaded tenacity. She should have cut and run a long time ago, but she never knew how to lose. They started out on far ends of Karin's kitchen, hadn't said more than two words to each other when Gavin stepped outside for a smoke break and heard her.

Huddled in the alleyway, she asked, phone pressed to her ear: _\--It's back?_

He hovered awkwardly, there at the corner of the street, caught between the blind eye and the helpful shoulder. _Shit, this isn't really my scene,_ he thought. Then realized, with a forceful clarity that swept the erstwhile demurral away: _What a stupid fucking thing to think._

Turning her phone over in her hands, Tina sniffled damply. Gavin cleared his throat.

_I don't know if you want to talk,_ he said, _but-- my name is Gavin._

She swiped the sleeve of her chef's coat over her eyes. _I know,_ she said. _You put too much vinegar in your rice._

Under its wildflower veil, the morsels of pike conger glimmer in diaphanous waiting. Nearly five hundred cuts down the length of its body, knifework so fine that the fish seems to ripple even as it lies still, like the froth at the crest of a breaking wave. Gavin always liked this, what he could do with honed metal in his hands. Technique was an honest thing; that, at least, no one could ever take away from him.

_Hank._ Gavin's first day at The 313, working line cook prep at the garde-manger station, all he did for half an hour was brunoise onions until his cutting board wept with their liquor. He kept his head down and made quick work of it, handful after handful of unerring uniformity -- something he could control -- and didn't notice Hank looking over his shoulder.

_Not half bad,_ said Hank.

_Shit,_ swore Gavin, startled. _I mean-- sorry._

Hank shrugged it off and picked up a pinch of onion, let it fall through his fingers like sand. _You know your way around a knife, kid,_ he said.

Something inside Gavin swelled to an aching tightness. _Chef,_ he muttered by way of thanks, and even then -- as Hank turned away and returned to the sauté station -- Gavin knew he would remember this, long after Hank had forgotten. That it would linger, unasked for, no matter how deep he dug to pry it out from under his skin.

But maybe you don't get to choose who holds the chisel, and maybe that's all right. _I do know my way around a knife,_ thinks Gavin. _You saw it, too._ Why pretend it never happened, waste his time trying to undo a part of what brought him here -- when _here_ is the faint rumble of traffic outside the restaurant and the weight of the saucepan in his hands -- and when Nines looks at him, like the Chinook wind that eats the snow, a certain something in the weather that settles against the small of his back and murmurs in his ear, _Gavin, be ready, it's time--_

"Hey, Nines," says Gavin. "Watch this."

He pours the stock in a long arcing stream over the plated bowl, a simmering waterfall. As the gold aroma of it steeps the air around them -- wrapping them close in a cloak of ease -- the eel touches heat and comes alive, blooms into a flower. Over its curled skin drawing taut together, every stroke of the knife slowly opens up, fifty petals unfurling like a milk-white aster. Little firework florets, dandelion clocks, each one so perfectly formed that it makes your breath catch in wonder.

_Nines. If this is enough for you, then take it._ At the heart of the dish is this, the knowledge that Nines has brought him: that all the restlessness Gavin found unmanageable in himself, never knowing when to stop, drowning out what he didn't want to hear with the sound of the knife on the block, the storm of the open flame, all of it could be turned to something worthwhile. In the right hands, five hundred open wounds could be a flower. Your broken edges, a miracle. Nines, his grip steady around Gavin's wrist as he holds the knife, telling him: _You could be something beautiful._

What if you muscled your way where you didn't belong, fists raised, ready for a fight-- but what you found there when you walked in was a familiar face, inviting you in. _I was waiting for you._ Maybe holding all of yourself together didn't have to hurt. If only you could lean back, into an ocean you could trust to hold you up. A bowl of something hot that could sate you, give you something of what you've been out looking for.

Gavin watches Nines as he tastes the dish, the bloom of the eel poised like a pearl on the dewdrop spoonful of stock. It's not hard to tell, when Nines thinks something is good. A turning inward of his eyes, a gentling of the corners of his mouth, his surprise a warmth that softens him and turns him touchable. And isn't that a kind of thrill -- that something can still surprise Nines, who sees a thing before it happens, always knows what's coming -- _that I can still surprise him._

"Gavin," says Nines. "This is--"

He pauses to look for the right word, and doesn't quite find it. Takes another bite, the steam curling from the bowl to graze the curve of his cheek.

"--It tastes," he says at last, "like arriving."

Like the snowmelt at the doorway to March, the running of the rivers down mountain slopes that winter had left forgotten. _Send the spring rushing through my veins like sap. Quench the deep and parched places in me, come and soothe the clamor of what was waiting for rain._ The lilies of the valley, the ringing of their bells, the meadow in its kindness no less wild or free than the blizzard you courted, once.

Nines sets the spoon down, gazes thoughtfully into the bottom of the empty bowl.

"I expected it to be good," he says, "but this is-- better than I knew it could be."

"Well," says Gavin, "you want to know what the secret is?"

"There's a secret?" asks Nines, looking up at him. "What is it?"

_That you are made by what's around you. The heat of the sun-baked galets roules when night falls over the vineyards of the Southern Rhone, the cloudless Alsatian months in the leeward rain shadow of the Vosges, the rolling coastal fog of Northern California like the cool damp hand of the Pacific, outstretched, eager to touch something unlike itself. All of it, bringing you closer to harvest._

_Nines. Be the trellis at my back when April comes._

"Terroir," says Gavin.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for sticking with this story through to the end. I wrote it hoping that you would read it; it truly means a lot to me that you did.
> 
> If you had a good time, tell your friends! Tell your enemies! Now and forevermore, I can be found at [16ruedelaverrerie](https://16ruedelaverrerie.tumblr.com) on tumblr and [@16rdlv](https://twitter.com/16rdlv) on Twitter. Thank you again for making all of it feel worthwhile.


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